AzukiDAO seeks return of 20,000 ETH from founder

The group of users of the Azuki NFT project, described as a DAO voted for a proposal to require its founder under the pseudonym Zagabond to return 20,000 ETH to the organisation.

The proposal received support from more than 88% of votes. It envisages hiring a lawyer to file a suit against Zagabond for “fraud across multiple projects”. The group also intends to demand from the team 200,000 ETH earned from the launch of the new NFT collection — Elementals.

According to the statement, the DAO’s funds will be used to “support the growth of the entire community”. The organisation said that they have already received free legal counsel and secured the backing of a witness.

Some members of the community noted that they had never heard of AzukiDAO before. NFTY.Finance co-founder Tytaninc suggested that this is ‘either a fake, or a group of bad actors’.

A user noted that the Bean governance token for DAO voting was launched on June 29.

On June 27, the project released the Elementals NFT collection. For early holders of the original Azuki tokens and assets from the BEANZ collection, a 20-minute pre-sale was opened. The result of the public token sale was that it did not take place.

Critics cited the Elementals release mechanism and the lack of originality in the images. Many argued they are merely slightly altered OG Azuki, potentially depressing the value of the originals.

“This time we missed. We hear you — the release process was rushed, the PFPs look similar and, worse, dilute Azuki,” the project team admitted.

The developers said that the original collection would always take priority, as would its token holders. They also previewed further NFT drops.

As of writing, on OpenSea 11% of all Elementals NFTs are listed. The top listing asks for 1337 ETH, which the owner paid 5 ETH for. However the base price for the collection’s tokens is 0.08 ETH.

For OG Azuki, the figure stands at 6.3 ETH, and the highest sale price reached 420.7 ETH.

As a reminder, in 2022 the studio behind the NFT project Chiru Labs raised $30 million in a Series A funding round.