Frequent collaborations with major IPs like Bilibili and Line Friends, can Azuki break the NFT growth dilemma?

Author: Xiyou, ChainCatcher

Recently, the NFT market has seen more negative news than positive. First, the floor price of the leading NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) series was pointed out to have dropped to 52.59 ETH, reaching a five-month low; then, the two earliest NFT OG players "Franklin" and "Brother Ma Ji Huang Li Cheng" announced their exit from the space, further worsening the already cold NFT market.

However, Azuki's performance in the secondary market seems unaffected by these negative news, with both the floor price and trading volume seemingly going against the tide, often surpassing BAYC in trading volume and activity.

According to CryptoSlam data, in the past 7 days, Azuki's trading volume reached $10.37 million, ranking second, with the first place being BAYC (trading volume of $12.66 million), with less than a million difference. Azuki's trading volume even surpassed BAYC multiple times within 24 hours, ranking first. Additionally, the floor price of Azuki series NFTs has been steadily rising, with an increase of about 21% in the past 7 days, now at 15.89 ETH (approximately $30,000).

Why has Azuki performed so well recently?

We may find clues from the trend of Azuki's floor price changes. On April 12, Azuki announced a collaboration with the IP company Line Friends to create the Beanz NFT IP, and both Azuki and Beanz NFT floor prices saw significant increases around this announcement.

The collaboration between Azuki and Line Friends is a major positive, helping its NFTs gain wider recognition and enhance brand awareness. However, some users are concerned that it may follow the path of the Bilibili collaboration, which ended up being inconclusive.

Collaboration with Line Friends to create Beanz IP, Azuki's floor price rises against the trend

On April 12, Azuki announced that its developer Chiru Labs had established a strategic partnership with IPX, the parent company of the well-known Korean IP company Line Friends, to jointly create the Beanz NFT IP.

Line Friends originally provided cartoon characters for chat dialogues on the social software Line, later developing into an IP operation platform, creating well-known IP characters such as Brown the bear, Cony the rabbit, and Sally the chick, with businesses including offline stores, games, animations, theme parks, and cafes. In 2022, it announced its rebranding to "IPX," indicating that the company would focus on building a digital IP business ecosystem.

Line Friends IP

Beanz NFT, translated as "little beans," was launched by Chiru Labs in April 2022. Beanz is a small species that sprouts from the soil of a garden, characterized as "Azuki's companions," adding fun to Azukis with their humorous movements. The Beanz NFT members include Red Bean Toshi, Blue Bean Gus, Black Bean Link, Little Lentil Tao, and Coffee Bean Johny C, each with different outfits, headgear, shoes, and hand props. The total issuance of this series is 20,000, with 10,000 airdropped to Azuki NFT holders.

Beanz NFT

It can be seen that Azuki and Beanz have become the two main NFT brands of Chiru Labs. Although the recognition of the Beanz series is far less than that of Azuki, the collaboration with IPX indicates that Beanz will become an important brand for the team to operate and develop.

Chiru Labs and IPX plan to collaborate through their respective assets to jointly launch some content, products, and activities, such as possibly introducing some Beanz-themed toy products for sale in Line Friends retail stores.

The first collaboration will feature a fusion of Line Friends characters and Beanz. Among them, the new friends "Jay" and "Jelly" introduced by Beanz in February will be the focus of this collaboration.

To celebrate this collaboration, Chiru Labs and IPX jointly launched "kigu gear" featuring Line Friends elements—hoodies with Brown the bear and Sally the chick. Beanz NFT holders can wear these outfits on their NFT characters, showcasing a new Beanz image.

Beanz NFT wearing Line Friends elements

In addition, the two companies will start airing Beanz-related animated shorts on the video billboard above the Line Friends store in Times Square, New York, from the day of the collaboration.

This move has led users to speculate that Azuki may have more commercial activities with Line Friends in the future, such as possibly expanding to other collaborative IP characters or even jointly launching some toys, which would be a huge benefit for both Azuki and Beanz NFTs.

As a result of this news, according to NFTGO, the trading volume of Beanz NFT surged by 512.5% within 24 hours, with the floor price breaking through 1.54 ETH, peaking at 1.78 ETH, an increase of over 10%; Azuki NFT trading volume skyrocketed by 350%, with the floor price reaching 14.7 ETH.

As of April 21, Beanz's market value was $58.61 million, with a floor price of 1.5 ETH, approximately $2,925, a 24-hour trading volume of $1.13 million, and 7,385 holding addresses. Azuki's market value was $370 million.

Bilibili collaboration results were dismal; can Azuki break the NFT growth dilemma through cross-industry collaboration?

The collaboration with the Line Friends brand is not Azuki's first exploration into cross-industry partnerships. Previously, Azuki had frequently appeared on domestic Web2 internet platforms, such as collaborating with Bilibili and entering Xiaohongshu.

In January this year, Azuki officially announced a collaboration with Bilibili International to explore Web3 innovations in anime and media content. Holders of Azuki, Beanz, and the NFT project Cheers Up, authorized by Bilibili, would unlock exclusive benefits, allowing users to change their avatars to their held NFTs and receive diamond tags, enabling them to find like-minded Azuki fans on Bilibili. Additionally, Cheers Up and Beanz jointly designed a related emoji pack for holders to use in comments on the Bilibili app and Discord.

At that time, the collaboration between Azuki and Bilibili was seen as a great opportunity for brand expansion, gaining a wave of user support. However, as the Cheer Up NFT project cooled down, Bilibili's resource support for Azuki also disappeared, and now, Azuki-related information can no longer be found on Bilibili International.

Previously, in December last year, Azuki's Chinese community "Red Bean Garden" announced its entry into Xiaohongshu by opening an account, where Xiaohongshu's digital collection R-Space would provide relevant resource support, such as allowing Azuki NFT holders to set their avatars as their NFT images and showcase their held NFTs in their personal homepage's digital collection space R-Space. Although it was not Azuki's official account, it attracted considerable user attention with the support of Xiaohongshu's official resources in the early stages of collaboration. However, as the domestic digital collection market cooled down, user attention also declined, and the last content update of Azuki's Chinese community's Xiaohongshu account was on January 23 of this year.

From the operational results of Azuki's collaborations with Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, and other Web2 platforms, the outcomes have not been satisfactory. Users are skeptical that the collaboration with Line Friends might follow the same path as the Bilibili partnership, starting strong but ending poorly. However, some users have a different view; regardless of the collaboration results, the Azuki project team has been continuously exploring new empowerment methods, which is a spirit worth learning from for every NFT project.

The frequent cross-industry collaborations by Azuki are mainly due to the cold NFT market and stagnant user growth, attempting to break through by partnering with Web2 companies to bring NFTs into the real world and attract more potential users.

Currently, due to the bear market in the crypto market, the NFT market's heat has dropped to freezing point. The floor prices of blue-chip projects like Moonbird, CoolCat, and Doodles continue to decline. Although there have been brief recoveries when positive news was released, the downward trend remains unaltered. According to NFTGo's BlueChipIndex, this index has been on a downward trend since its peak of 14,526 in April 2022, currently below 8,000 points. As of April 21, the NFT market value was $22 billion, down 36% from its peak of $34 billion, with a trading volume of $1.27 billion in the last 30 days, a decrease of 34.8%.

Moreover, well-known physical companies that previously announced support for NFTs or metaverse development have begun to cut related business budgets. For instance, at the end of March, Disney announced the layoff of all members of its metaverse department; Meta's Facebook and Instagram social platforms officially ceased support for NFT display functions on April 11.

As the bubble bursts, users are paying more attention to the intrinsic value of NFTs and the ways in which they can be empowered. In the context of stagnation in the NFT market's development, NFT projects need to find ways to save themselves to maintain their blue-chip status, such as issuing tokens or new NFTs.

On April 18, Moonbirds announced the launch of a reward token TALONS, which NFT holders can accumulate daily through "nesting." In the future, the token can be used to bid for whitelist spots, exclusive product benefits, etc.; on April 21, Cool Cats announced the launch of a new ecological NFT series "Shadow Wolves," categorized as "Super Cool" members, expanding the Cool Cats ecosystem.

However, on the day the news was announced, Moonbird's floor price did not change and instead showed a downward trend, now at 2.9 ETH; Cool Cats' floor price also dropped, currently at 0.8 ETH. From the market attention, floor price, and trading volume changes of these NFT projects, it appears that community users are not buying into these developments.

How to break the emotional manipulation and truly achieve sustained growth remains a long-term challenge that NFT project teams and community users need to face.