Elementals was first teased last week at a holders-only event in Las Vegas. The project announced that it will airdrop half of the 20,000 NFTs, based on the four Azuki elements of earth – fire – lightning – water, to Azuki and BEANZ NFT holders.
The remaining NFT were available for presale on June 27, starting at 9:00 am PT. To participate in the presale, Azuki and BEANZ holders need to stake 2 ETH. The public auction follows a Dutch auction model and the initial mint price is 2ETH and then gradually declines by 0.1 ETH every 5 minutes until all 10,000 Elementals are sold in the public auction.
However, all Azuki Elementals have sold out in the presale and there is no public sale. According to data from Etherscan, the wallet address that holds the Elementals mint funds amassed 20,000 ETH, worth $38 million at the time of writing. It’s been more than a year since we’ve seen the NFT mints generate over $30 million in sales after Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds for Otherside collection.
However, the presale also caused many controversies. Many people were disappointed as they were not airdropped despite meeting the condition of holding Azuki or BEANZ NFTs; meanwhile, others complained about technical problems on the minting platform, Chris Lepensky, data lead at DAO operations firm Utopia Labs, claimed that many Azuki owners were unable to mint due to website errors and contract issues but Chris deleted the tweet then.
Location tba, one of the co-founders of Azuki and parent company Chiru Labs, wrote: “We should have extended the duration to more than 10 minutes to allow a sufficient buffer in the case of any issues (of which there were). We were hoping for a smooth and streamlined experience from mint straight to reveal, but that didn’t happen.”
Of the 10,000 NFTs available for presale, 7,600 NFTs are minted by Azuki holders, the rest are going to BEANZ holders, the project added.
Launched in January 2022 by Chiru Labs, Azuki is an NFT project featuring 10,000 unique, generative avatars inspired by Japanese anime and street culture. Chiri Labs successfully raised $30 million in Series A in November 2022. At that time, the company’s valuation was about $300-400 million. The collection earlier this year launched virtual city Hilumia as a platform exclusively for NFT holders.