It's always both challenging & exciting opening up the gate to the Garden. This time, we missed the mark.
We hear you - the mint process was hectic, the PFPs feel similar and, even worse, dilutive to Azuki. We chose to lean in on the idea of Elementals. Each Elemental is tied to a domain - Water, Fire, Lightning, Earth - and all of them come with unique traits that are specific to their domain. We also added animals & kids, which are completely new members in the Garden. With that, we had the ambitious goal for creating characters that feel consistent with their Azuki roots, while still offering something new. Our goal for Elementals is to grow the Garden, welcome new members into the community, and most importantly to expand the Azuki universe and set a foundation for a decentralized IP with deep lore.
One that enables us to create a new type of anime that’s already under production. The OG Azuki collection defined who we are, and will always have top priority and outsized allocation for all future rewards, drops, and experiences. They will always be the top tier of access into the Garden. To the team, we always tried to operate with the understanding that the original Azuki collection would be at the center of our universe. However, we realize that this was not clearly communicated to the community. However, our ambitious goals led to a new collection which confused the community on the tangible differences with the original Azuki collection. We challenged ourselves to make 4 variations of almost every clothing, offhand, and other traits and then adjusted to fit across adults, kids, and animals. The result was something that we thought would grow the Garden closer to our ultimate vision.
One more thing... This one’s still a little green: https://t.co/FpeG96L4eg Azuki’s vision is to build a decentralized brand. Doing so requires great communication and execution, both of which were lacking with the Elementals sale. We know that we lost a piece of trust today, but nothing gets us more motivated to make things right.