Original author: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher
Original author: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher
Recently, there have been more negative news in the NFT market than positive news. First, the floor price of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) series, the leading NFT project, was pointed out to have dropped to 52.59 ETH, the lowest point in five months; Announcing their withdrawal one after another, making the already cold NFT market even worse.
However, Azuki’s performance in the secondary market does not seem to be affected by these bad news. The floor price and transaction volume seem to be going against the current, and the transaction volume and activity have surpassed BAYC many times.
According to CryptoSlam data, in the past 7 days, Azuki ranked second with a transaction volume of 10.37 million US dollars, which is less than 1 million away from the top-ranked BAYC (with a transaction volume of 12.66 million), and even exceeded the transaction volume within 24 hours many times BAYC, ranked first. And the Azuki series NFT floor price is also rising steadily, with an increase of about 21% in the past 7 days, and it is now 15.89 ETH (about 30,000 US dollars).
Why has Azuki performed so well recently?
The cooperation between Azuki and Line Friends can be described as a major benefit, which can help its NFT out of the circle and increase brand awareness. But there are also users who are worried about whether they will step into the cooperation of station B, and it will be nothing later.
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Partnering with Line Friends to create Beanz IP, Azuki floor prices buck the trend
Line Friends originally provided the social software Line with emoji cartoon images used in chat conversations. Later, it developed into an IP operation platform IP, creating well-known IP images such as Brown Brown Bear, Cony Bunny, and Sally Little Yellow Chicken. The business includes Line Stores, games, animations, theme parks, coffee shops, etc. In 2022, it was announced that it would be renamed IPX, indicating that enterprises will focus on building a digital IP business ecosystem.
Line Friends IP
Beanz NFT is translated as Little Bean, launched by Chiru Labs in April 2022, Beanz is a small species that sprouts from the soil of the garden, and is given the Azukis partner persona, using their antics as Azukis add to the fun. Representative members of Beanz NFT include red bean Toshi, blue bean Gus, black bean Link, lentil Tao, coffee bean Johny C, etc. Each bean has a different appearance from clothing, headgear, shoes, hand props, etc. The total number of issued in the series is 20,000, of which 10,000 are airdropped to Azuki NFT holders.
Beanz NFT
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It can be seen that Azuki and Beanz have become the two main NFT brands of Chiru Labs. Although the popularity of the Beanz series is far less than that of Azuki, from the perspective of cooperation with IPX, Beanz will become an important operation and brand for the team.
Chiru Labs and IPX plan to cooperate through their respective assets to jointly launch some content, products and activities, etc. For example, there may be some Beanz element dolls sold in Line Friends retail stores.
To celebrate this partnership, Chiru Labs and IPX have jointly launched kigu gear with Line Friends elements—Brown Brown Bear, Sally Little Yellow Chicken Hooded Sweatshirt, etc., which can be worn by Beanz NFT holders on the NFT Image, will show a new Beanz image.
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Beanz NFT wearing Line Friends elements
In addition, the two companies will start playing Beanz-related short animations on video billboards above the Line Friends store in Times Square, New York starting from the date of the partnership.
This move made users continue to speculate that Azuki may have more business activities with Line Friends in the future, such as expanding to other cooperative IP characters, and even jointly launching some dolls, etc. This is very important for Azuki and Beanz, two major NFT It is a huge benefit.
As of April 21, the market value of Beanz was US$58.61 million, the floor price was 1.5 ETH, about US$2925, the 24-hour trading volume was US$1.13 million, and the number of holding addresses was 7385. Azuki has a market cap of $370 million.
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Bilibili cooperation results are bleak, can Azuki solve the NFT growth dilemma through cross-border cooperation?
Crossing borders with brand Line Friends isnt Azukis first foray. Prior to this, Azuki has frequently appeared on the domestic Web2 Internet platform, such as cooperating with Bilibili and entering Xiaohongshu.
In January this year, Azuki officially announced to cooperate with Station B (Bilibili International) to explore Web3 innovations in animation and media content. Holders of the Cheers up NFT project authorized by Azuki, Beanz and Bilibili overseas will unlock exclusive benefits, support users to exchange their avatars for the NFT they hold, and get a diamond tag, so they can find Azukis like-minded people on station B. In addition, Cheers UP and Beanz jointly designed an emoji pack of related elements for holders to use in comments and Discord in the Bilibili app.
At that time, the cooperation between Azuki and Station B was considered a good opportunity for the brand to go out of the circle, and it won a large wave of user support. However, as the CheerUp NFT project went cold, Bilibili’s resource support for Azuki also disappeared. Today, Azuki-related information cannot be retrieved in Bilibili International.
Prior to this, in December last year, Azukis Chinese community Hongdou Garden announced that it had settled in Xiaohongshu and opened an account. Among them, R-Space, the digital collection of Xiaohongshu, will provide relevant resource support. Set it as the image of NFT, and display the NFT it holds on the digital collection space R-Space on the personal homepage. Although it is not Azukis official account, it also attracted the attention of many users with the support of Xiaohongshus official resources in the early stage of cooperation. However, as the domestic data collection market turns cold, user attention has also declined. The last content update time of the Xiaohongshu account in the Azuki Chinese community stayed on January 23 this year.
Judging from the final operation results of cross-border cooperation between Azuki and Bilibili, Xiaohongshu and other Web2 platforms, it is not satisfactory. Users doubt whether the cooperation with Line Friends will follow in the footsteps of the cooperation with Station B. It is a red start and a dismal end. However, some users have different views on this. Regardless of the outcome of the cooperation, the Azuki project party has at least been exploring new ways of empowerment. This spirit is worth learning for every NFT project party.
The main reason behind Azukis frequent cross-border cooperation is that the growth of users in the NFT market has stagnated. He is trying to cooperate with Web2 companies to make NFT out of the circle, extend the virtual Web3 project to the real world, and attract more potential users.
At present, due to the bear market in the encryption market, the popularity of the NFT market has dropped to freezing point. The floor prices of blue-chip projects such as Moonbird, CoolCat, and Doodles have continued to fall. Although there was a short-term recovery when the good news was released, they still could not reverse the downward trend. According to NFTGos Blue Chip Index (BlueChipIndex), the index has been on a downward trend since its high of 14526 in April 2022, and is currently below 8,000 points. As of April 21, the market value of NFT was US$22 billion, which has shrunk by 36% compared to the peak period of US$34 billion. In the past 30 days, the trading volume of the NFT market was US$1.27 billion, a month-on-month decrease of 34.8%.
In addition, well-known entities that previously announced with great fanfare to support the development of NFT or Metaverse have also begun to reduce related business budgets. For example, at the end of March, Disney announced the dismissal of all members of the Metaverse department; Meta’s Facebook and Instagram social platforms were officially released on April 11. Disable the related support functions for NFT display, etc.
When the bubble fades, users pay more attention to the value of NFT itself and the way resources are empowered. With the stagnant development of the NFT market, NFT projects need to find ways to save themselves if they want to keep their blue-chip status, such as issuing tokens or new NFTs.
On April 18, Moonbirds Moonbird NFT announced the launch of the reward token TALONS, which NFT holders can accumulate every day through nesting. In the future, use tokens to bid for white lists, exclusive commodity benefits, etc.; On April 21, Cool Cats announced the launch of a new ecological NFT series Shadow Wolves, which is classified as a Super Cool member and is a member of the Cool Cats ecosystem. expand.
However, on the day the news was announced, the floor price of Moonbird did not change, but showed a downward trend, and is now 2.9 ETH; the floor price of Cool Cats also fell, and is now 0.8 ETH. Judging from the market attention, floor price and transaction volume changes of these NFT projects, community users do not pay for it.