The second-rarest piece in the collection, Azuki 9605, sold for a record 420.69 ETH ($1.43M USD) this morning, putting the fast-rising NFT Azuki on the map.
For those unfamiliar with the Los Angeles-based collective, their 10,000 avatars represent every aspect of anime’s decades-long history, from streetwear to samurai insignia and everything in between. Thus every avatar furthermore guarantees owners access to ‘The Garden,’ Azuki’s own metaverse “where art, community and culture fuse to create magic.”
The notion appears to be resonating with the NFT community as a whole, with the collective posting the third-highest sales volume of any collection in the last month, trailing only the Bored Ape and Mutant Ape Yacht Club. Take a look at Azuki 9605 below.
My incredible friends at @redbeandao and I have sold the #2 rarity Azuki for 420.7 ETH.
Big congratulations to Jason @Bitcoin4Freedom. Incredible purchase on the most prized Azuki in the collection. pic.twitter.com/1RQnIDW907
— tre (@trebooomin) March 30, 2022
According to data from The Block Research, a prominent worldwide information services organization, the Azuki line, which was launched just a few months ago, has already racked up sales of $500 million.
Azuki is an Ethereum-based profile image project that was launched on January 12, 2022. Chiru Labs, a group of four people based in Los Angeles, came up with the idea.
There are 10,000 anime-styled profile photos in the collection, each with unique qualities and visual styles. Type, hair, face, neck, eyes, ears, mouth, headgear, special, clothing, offhand, and backdrop are all configurable features for each Azuki avatar.
On the official Azuki website, users can view these attributes on individual photos. Specific features, or a combination of them, can cause NFT prices to rise. On January 12, the first batch of NFTs was sold out in just three minutes. Each NFT sold for $3,400, resulting in $29 million in sales.
To begin, the NFT collection was created utilising the ERC721A token standard, which is a variant of the ERC721 token standard. Chiru Labs invented the token standard, which allows users to mint several NFTs in a single transaction, lowering the required gas charge and shortening the minting time. This token standard is now being used by over 27 projects to create NFTs.
The second breakthrough involves Azuki’s sales strategy. There were three stages to the original sales: a Dutch auction, a Mintlist, and a public sale. The Dutch auction is a price reduction model in which the price of each NFT in the collection is reduced after a predetermined amount of time has passed. This is repeated until the price reaches the lowest lower bound. The first batch of NFTs were sold for 1 ETH, with the price reducing by 0.05 ETH every 20 minutes until it fell to 0.15 ETH.
A Mintlist was used in the second stage. Previous NFT experiments chose people from social media at random, but Chiru Labs adopted a different strategy, screening members of their social media groups and choosing only those who were active in the community. During the Mintlist phase, members had 48 hours to finish minting the NFTs. The minting price was about half of the lowest auction price in the Netherlands.
Finally, on January 15, the public sale phase began, and the remaining Azuki NFTs were sold for the lowest price possible during the Dutch auction.
The Azuki Collection’s popularity and sales have risen steadily, from $29 million in its first batch of NFTs to $300 million in February and now $500 million.
An Azuki NFT was sold for more over $1 million in a secondary auction on March 30, 2022. Azuki #9605 was sold for $1.42 million, more than doubling the previous record of Azuki #466, which was sold for around $586,000. On the Opensea marketplace, the top-ranked Azuki NFT #2152 is now listed for 500 ETH ($1.69 million).
