Original Author: Tang Yuan
Original Author: Tang Yuan
On September 22, some media disclosed that Chiru Labs, the parent company of Azuki, a Japanese anime-style NFT project, raised $30 million in its latest Series A financing, which will raise its valuation to $300-400 million. However, the financing news has not been confirmed by Chiru Labs. But two other blue-chip NFT projects received definite capital infusions.
On September 13, Doodles, a hand-painted cartoon character NFT project, completed a financing of US$54 million at a valuation of US$704 million. Investors include Seven Seven Six, FTX Ventures and 10T Holdings and other institutions. Doodles said that the financing will be invested in expanding the team, product development and technology.
On August 30, PROOF, the parent company of the owl pixel avatar NFT project Moonbirds, completed a US$50 million Series A financing. This round of financing was led by a16z, and institutions such as Flamingo DAO, Vayner Fund and Seven Seven Six participated in the investment.
In less than a month, the NFT blue-chip sector has completed at least two large-scale financing events of tens of millions of dollars, which is particularly conspicuous in the crypto bear market. Some people in the industry believe that the financing of blue-chip NFT projects is self-help in the bear market, so prepare food and grass for the winter.
Indeed, since the second quarter of this year, the trading volume of NFT has fallen off a cliff. According to NFTGO data, the daily trading volume of the NFT market since May this year has been about 200-300 million US dollars, which has shrunk by 90% compared to the average daily trading volume of 2-3 billion US dollars during the peak period from January to April this year. %.
The shrinking trading volume has directly hit the main source of profit for NFT projects-royalties. To make matters worse, NFT's royalty model is still being transformed by some trading platforms-shifting to royalty-free or adjustable royalties to increase users' willingness to buy. This is very unfavorable for NFT entrepreneurial projects, and objectively forces them to innovate their gameplay and find new business or development models.
As second-tier blue-chip projects, NFT projects such as Azuki, Doodles, and Moonbirds, which started from social avatars, need to complete differentiated transformation, and transformation or upgrading requires costs. Financing is undoubtedly the best way, but if you want to win the favor of capital, you must allow Hot money sees growth. It can be seen that all three projects are working hard to remove the label "NFT is a small picture".
Azuki moved the airdrop gameplay into the Metaverse
In any case, the Azuki series finally has its ups and downs and is no longer a stagnant water. In fact, it's only been out for 9 months. In January of this year, the NFT series consisting of 10,000 Japanese manga avatars was launched immediately, and it was welcomed by the market. The reason is simple. Finally, there are NFT avatars in the market that do not follow the pixel style.
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The style of the Azuki series
Due to the excellent paintings and the first anime style, Azuki quickly swept the purchasing power of NFT enthusiasts, and the floor price rose all the way from the public offering of 1 ETH, and rose to a high of 30 ETH in less than 5 months, occupying the blue-chip NFT sector. Pit position, the trading volume has long been ranked in the top ten of the NFT rankings.
The popularity of Azuki has also made the outside world interested in its development team ChiruLabs. According to public information, it is composed of a group of artists and developers in Los Angeles. They have experience in DeFi research and development and a background in the game industry. A member of Zagabond is the principal of ChiruLabs.
Azuki is the first NFT project created by Chiru Labs. According to the official plan, it will become a metaverse brand promoted by the community in the future. The team will create metaverse games, 3D virtual scenes, etc. around this IP, and will also expand offline comics, Clothing and other physical objects, fan meetings and music festivals and other activities are held.
The soaring sales of Azuki at the beginning of its launch are not only related to its appearance, but more importantly, it has created a new standard for NFT smart contracts "ERC-721A". With this standard, users only need to pay a GAS fee on the chain to cast in batches ( Mint) multiple NFTs, which directly reduces the cost for NFT enthusiasts to obtain Genesis NFTs.
In addition to optimizing smart contract standards, Azuki also introduces a new NFT gameplay - fragmentation. The NFT numbered "Azuki#40 Bobu" was broken into 50,000 fragments, and each fragment was represented by the homogeneous Token "BOBU". It launched BOBU, the governance token, in the form of fragmented NFT, which is a relatively new way of playing in the field of NFT projects.
The flexible Azuki came up with another way-sticky push. In April of this year, Azuki, whose English translation is "Red Bean", launched the Beanz NFT series of bean images. It has also been given the character design of "Azuki's partner". Its initial floor price is less than 1 ETH, which is much cheaper than Azuki.
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Image of Beanz series NFT
The emergence of Beanz enables Azuki to give back to the original holders without diluting the value of the original NFT, and also lowers the threshold for new users to enter the Azuki ecosystem.
It can be said that Azuki's success in the first half of this year is mainly due to the gameplay. It built a sub-IP line around the main IP and gradually enriched its story. This is the result of operations, but it still does not break the NFT field. "The business model of making a living, the actual use is still a social avatar.
When the outside world thought that this NFT IP was just going to play the old routine of selling peripherals offline, in July, the "The Alley" (alley) page appeared in the World section of Azuki's official website, and the alley was described as "Azuki holders The door to the future world", there are many airdrop clues left in the door. People have an epiphany that Azuki's metaverse world plan is coming.
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Azuki's "The Alley" page
Just last Friday, on the World update page, a game interface of "The Ruins" (ruin remains) appeared, where NFT holders can play a game of whack-a-mole. "The Ruins" is the second virtual world in the Azuki world that users can enter after the opening of "The Alley". Although these two new products have not yet shown more features, the outside world has already felt that Azuki is implementing the original Positioning and constructing metaverse ecology.
Azuki's recent actions may be a side confirmation of its financing news. After all, the cost of developing the Metaverse is much higher than issuing a series of NFTs.
Doodles turns to Web3 multimedia brand
The blue-chip NFT project that has actually received financing is Doodles. This project launched in October 2021 initially released 10,000 NFTs of hand-painted cartoon avatars in various shapes. Stand out from the avatar, and today's valuation has jumped to $700 million with a $54 million financing.
Due to the popularity of the creator, Doodles became a blue-chip NFT shortly after its launch, and its transaction volume has also occupied the top 10 in the NFT market for a long time. According to NFTGO data, on September 28, the floor price of Doodles was 7.76ETH, which is about $10,000.
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The shape of the Doodles series NFT
Community building has always been one of the biggest selling points of Doodles, and it is also a model of community governance for NFT projects.
In order to increase the participation of community users, Doodles has set up a Doodlebank (DAO) treasury for NFT holders to support community members in activities to enhance brand influence. To this end, Doodles agreed that 50% (royalty) of the sales revenue in the secondary market will be sent to Doodlebank, and the development team will regularly update the size of the funds and publish the treasury data in the community Discord every week. How the treasury funds are used is completely determined by the community. Each holder of Doodles NFT can propose a proposal to determine the allocation of funds and the strategic direction of the project, and then the holders vote for the proposal to determine whether it is passed. As of September 28, there were 2940 ETH worth $3.82 million in Doodlebank.
In order to increase the gameplay of NFT, in February this year, Doodles created the "Space Doodles" (spaceship) props. NFT holders can receive "spaceships" for free for their Doodle characters to carry.
Based on this, the player speculates that Doodles may also launch a metaverse plan related to space in the future, but this guess has not been confirmed by the project party's actions. It wasn't until May of this year, when Doodles ushered in the newly appointed CEO Julian Holguin, that the new plans for the project began to be exposed to the outside world.
Holguin has a solid background as a former executive at US entertainment magazine Billboard, with over 14 years of experience in media and entertainment executive management, with extensive experience in media, digital publishing, social media, streaming, television and live events experience. As soon as Holguin took office, Doodles stated that it would expand the current NFT market and focus on music, games, premium content and consumer products. Doodles is also repositioning itself as "the world's largest and most loved Web3 media brand", targeting the mainstream consumer market through culture and entertainment.
In the following June, at the NFT NYC conference, Doodles announced the appointment of well-known music producer Pharrell Williams as chief brand officer to help Doodles shape the series of NFT strategies in music, artwork, consumer products, animation and events. On the same day, Doodles announced that it had raised an undisclosed amount in its Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.
This prediction was also confirmed in the subsequent movements of Doodles. On May 12, the project launched the Dooplicator equipment box NFT, which can be used in the Doodles2 stage. On June 28, Doodles2 released an introduction, which is a series of dynamic NFTs. Users can change the appearance of the Doodles image according to their needs, turning it into a full-body frame, with optional skin and hair colors, which can be worn through The Genesis Box. Equip a custom Doodle avatar, and each new Doodle will appear accompanied by animation and original music.
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Doodles 2 allows users to customize dynamic NFT images
As of September 28, the real function of Doodles 2 has not been officially opened to the public, but two equipment boxes have entered the secondary market for users to configure. It can be seen that Doodles is stepping out of the JPEG camp, moving towards dynamic and three-dimensional, and moving towards its Web3 multimedia brand positioning.
Moonbirds open copyright to make up for development shortcomings
Whether it is Azuki or Doodles, in the crypto bear market, they can be noticed by venture capital institutions because they are updating their development routes, relying on innovative products and expanding ecological boundaries to break the outside world's inherent impression that it is "only avatars or pictures".
Moonbirds is an NFT series of pixel avatars launched by the PROOF team. The image is mainly based on cartoon owls, and the total circulation is 10,000. On April 16 this year, Moonbirds started public casting at a price of 2.5 ETH, and the trading volume once surpassed the top NFT projects BAYC and CryptoPunks. On September 28, OpenSea data showed that the floor price of the Moonbirds NFT series was still above 10 ETH, about $14,000.
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Image of Moonbirds series NFT
The early success of Moonbirds stems from the strong background and operational capabilities of the PROOF team behind it. PROOF was also a NFT-focused podcast team last year. It has a private club of 1,000 NFT collectors. Members include Beeple, an NFT artist whose work was sold at Christie's at a high price, and investors Gary Vaynerchuk and Kevin Rose. The threshold for membership of this club is PROOF Collective NFT. Holders of this NFT can access the club's Discord, get podcast content in advance, unlock free NFT airdrops, etc.
After PROOF launched the Moonbirds NFT, every member of the club received 2 for free. On April 26, less than 10 days after Moonbirds launched, PROOF raised $10 million from venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.
With the help of capital, Moonbirds is rising, and PROOF strikes while the iron is hot, announcing the launch of a new NFT series Moonbirds Oddities, 10,000 new NFT series in the form of a pixel version of cartoon kiwi birds, some of which are airdropped to Moonbirds holders. But this "Bundled Birds" series is no longer the glory of its main IP "Owl". On September 28, the floor price of the Moonbirds Oddities series NFT was 1.17 ETH, which is about $1388.
The same problem, whether it is Moonbirds or the derivative version of Moonbirds Oddities, it is still avatars and pictures. Obviously, compared with Doodles and Azuki, the PROOF team that gathers NFT collectors lacks ecological development capabilities, and consumes its own team aura in the issuance of depreciated image NFTs one after another.
Perhaps out of self-help, on August 5 this year, Kevin Rose announced that the Moonbirds and Moonbirds Oddities series of NFTs will be converted to "CC0 mode", opening the copyright of these two NFT series to everyone, and supporting anyone based on these two NFTs Project re-creation or derivative new products. In the future, Moonbirds DAO will be established to support and supervise the ecological development.
On August 30th, PROOF hosted the "Future PROOF" online live broadcast. Kevin Rose announced the new route, including the release of the third new NFT series Moonbirds Mythic in early 2023, giving back to the NFT holders of the first two series; PROOF Web3 social platform, supports curation by NFT holders or collectors; integrates research reports, podcasts, DAO proposals and other content resources in the PROOF ecosystem; supports CC0 and the creation of Moonbirds DAO, executes and supervises trademark authorization and fund allocation; In the future, PROOF tokens will also be issued.
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