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Having cut his teeth in DeFi before discovering NFTs, Zagabond created one of the top-tier NFT projects and anime-based brands in Azuki.
Originally minting in January 2022, the founder and project have had their trials and tribulations but have come through the other side. This week, they launch a “culture coin” called ANIME that aims to create a community-owned network.
“And the way I look at Anime coin is that it’s a culture coin that represents the anime industry, so the industry becomes a digital economy where a billion global fans can shape and own the future of the anime together,” he says. More on ANIME later.
The original collection Azuki currently sits at a 10.5 ETH floor price with a massive 810,000 ETH in volume in three years. The Azuki ecosystem is also home to Beanz, Elementals and Elemental Beans. Beanz was originally airdropped to Azuki holders just minutes after Zagabond’s “Check your wallets” announcement at NFT LA in 2022, which became part of NFT folklore.
Zagabond heard about Bitcoin around 2014, but his true introduction to crypto was via Ethereum around 2017, which ultimately led him to become a founding member of 0x.
“I had a friend Linda Shay who was an early employee at Coinbase and her husband Will Warren, they were working on this new protocol called 0x. At that point, the term DeFi hadn’t even been coined yet. Will was saying, ‘It’s a decentralized exchange protocol where you could facilitate peer-to-peer exchange on an open protocol or on an open blockchain.’ It was called Ethereum,” says Zagabond.
“That’s when I started diving more into the tech of Ethereum and realized this is like Bitcoin but on steroids. It’s like a supercomputer, and having peer-to-peer exchange just felt super powerful. I dove into this and ended up becoming a founding member of 0x, and that’s how I got started in crypto.”
What enticed Zagabond to NFTs?
In 2018, Zagabond got his hands on a CryptoKitties NFT at the first ETH Global Hackathon — but he didn’t take them seriously at the time.
“A team had these Pokemon cards with pictures of these CryptoKitties, which they’d printed and taped over it. They said, ‘Scan this QR code; you can mint this kitten on the blockchain,’” Zagabond says.
“I sort of just laughed it off because I was there to talk about DeFi, you know, the future of finance and serious stuff, but they were giving out these Gen 0 CryptoKitties. That was my very first NFT.”
When NBA TopShot started to catch steam in late 2020, that’s when the Azuki founder really started to lean into the concept of NFTs and ponder the possibilities.
“Ultimately, when NFTs came around in late 2020 with NBA TopShot, that was the first project where I was, like, ‘Wait, hold on, these are NFTs; these are tokens, but they have completely obfuscated that away from the end-user,’ and I remember looking at the NBA TopShot site, and they didn’t mention NFTs or crypto anywhere on the site.”
“But these are moments that you could collect; it uses an IP that everyone knows, which is the NBA, and there’s hundreds of millions of fans that love the NBA across the world, and the product was awesome. This concept of truly owning a scarce collectible digital trading card was really fascinating to me.”
Zagabond could see the opportunity with NFTs to mix in culturally exciting and relevant themes into crypto to make the industry more mainstream-friendly.
“I thought, ‘This is a big opportunity, and this is what is going to onboard the next million people.’”
The birth of Azuki
Azuki started around July 2021 when Zagabond started cooking up his vision for a decentralized brand focusing on the anime genre that showcased his passion for culture, fashion and brand. On January 13, 2022, the original Azuki collection was minted.
Subsequent collections followed: the OG collection with Beanz (March 2022), Azuki Elementals (June 2023) and Azuki Elemental Beans (June 2023) to fill out the broad Azuki ecosystem.
“I spent four years at 0x. I’m not a big numbers guy. I like the power of DeFi, but I don’t think this is my calling. I think NFTs was really the perfect amalgamation of all of my interests, so that’s when I left and started working on NFTs full time,” Zagabond says.
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“The vision for Azuki is to create an open anime universe, and we’re doing that first by creating a decentralized brand alongside the community. To be a part of the ecosystem, we have three main collections,” he says.
“It’s very similar to the Bored Ape model where there’s the Bored Apes, the Mutant Apes and then there’s the Doggos. I think the only difference here is that Beanz is a stand-alone IP, and it’s something that we’re continuing to invest money in to grow that IP.”
While Azuki wasn’t the first project to base its art and brand around anime, it quickly became the leader with its well-received art, lore, physical merch drops and events in the early days of the project.
Part of the motivation for the collection was Zagabond looking around at the majority of projects during the 2021 NFT mania and seeing a lack of quality anime and projects that leaned into Asian representation.
“For myself being Asian-American, being born in China and really loving anime as an art form and growing up on it, I thought, ‘Why not create a brand that encapsulates Web3 culture but is represented through anime as a medium?’ So, that idea started becoming really interesting to me, and I remember just telling myself no matter what I do with this project, I just want it to be authentic to me. I’m just going to build a club and a brand that I would want to be a part of. That’s how the idea originally came about.”
Launching a culture coin
The anticipation of the launch of ANIME has driven the spotlight onto the numerous Azuki collections, with a large portion of the self-described culture coin going to holders. While the token will be released by Anime.xyz Foundation and Azuki, Zagabond has high hopes it can help transform the anime industry into a community-owned network.
Set to launch today (January 23, 2025), Zagabond speaks about the similarities he sees in what was a former generation of internet users bonding around a #hashtag to a newer generation adopting the TICKER in forming a community.
“At a high level, I think what we’re seeing now with tokenization and what Web3 and crypto enables is that I feel like this last generation of social media, what we had was the hashtag. It allowed people to share culture and allowed people to say, ‘Hey, this is trending. I want to share it with you.’ What’s happening now with crypto is not only about sharing culture because now with the ticker instead of the hashtag, we can now own part of the culture together,” says Zagabond.
“When you take this concept and think about the anime industry, which is one of the strongest fandoms in the world with over a billion fans, tokenizing this fandom and tokenizing this culture can help transform the anime industry into a community owned network.”
ANIME was announced on January 13, and the feedback seemed supportive of the tokenomics giving a more than 50% of the allocation to the community when you combine the Azuki community split (37.5%) and Community cultivation (13%) split, with all community tokens being fully unlocked at launch.
“It was well received, especially with the community because 37.5% of the total supply is going to the Azuki community, and you know, these holders have been with us through thick and thin — they deserve to be rewarded. 37.5% allocation plus what we call the community cultivation allocation, which is all to the community as well. Added up together, 50.5% of the total supply is going to the community, and I think that’s pretty powerful.”
Asked to describe a culture coin, Zagabond points to memecoins being more ephemeral than culture coins and points to both PEPE and MOG as being other examples.
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“I would say culture coins are an evolution of memecoins from my perspective. I think memecoins are really just coins that represent attention, and most memes are sort of like content. When content comes out, people watch it, and then people forget about it, so most memes are ephemeral. But the ones that can really last for a long time and persist throughout culture, those are the ones I would define as culture coins,” says Zagabond.
“I believe Pepe is one. It’s ingrained in internet culture, especially in crypto culture. Those memes are being used everywhere. I would say another developing one is Mog. The reason why I think that is a very strong cultural coin is because it’s very unique. The cat emoji is being used as a verb, and they sort of popularized it. Others try to copy it, but they are the originators of this. There’s a very strong community behind it, and it’s part of crypto culture now.”
Rapid Fire Q&A with Zagabond
What was your first-ever crypto purchase?
“Ethereum was my first crypto purchase. I bought it on Coinbase in early 2017.”
What is your favorite NFT outside of your PFP that you currently hold?
“I would say it’s probably an Art Blocks collection. It’s called “Flowers by RVig,” and the reason why it’s my favorite is because just before things started getting really busy at Azuki, I went on this one date, and I remember when I asked her out, I sent her these NFT flowers, kind of gave her a personal check your wallet moment. She was already in the crypto space, so she had a wallet, and I got her address, and I sent her one of the Flowers by RVig collection. She loved it, so that collection is really cool to me. It’s like a generative flower collection; some of them are really beautiful, so I would say that’s probably up there for me.”
Do you have a favorite digital artist in the space?
“Recently, I’ve been a big fan of Yuka. She’s an anime artist in the community. Yuka does commission art for Azuki holders, and she’s based in Tokyo. I love her artwork — it’s very unique.”
What’s an NFT project that you think people are potentially sleeping on?
“I’d probably say “Kaiju Kingz,” which is a pixel art collection. I haven’t heard much about them recently, and I don’t know what’s going on there, but I remember talking to the founder and felt like he was an awesome builder and really in it for the right reasons. Maybe that’s a slept-on one right now because I haven’t seen many people talk about it.”
Who would be your top three favorite followers on X (Twitter) for NFTs?
1. DFarmer — “He’s an Azuki but also strong in the Ape community. He tweets more than just NFTs, but DFarmer is an awesome follow. He always cuts straight to the chase — no BS. So, he’s up there for me.”
2. Wale — “Obviously, you have to give a shout-out to our guy Wale. When we first talked to Wale, he didn’t have that many followers, and he was in the Clone X community at the time, but we saw his content, his threads, and we really saw a lot of potential in him, so we reached out and asked whether he would like to come do research for us. To provide us with some data and some thoughts on how things are going in the space.”
“That was a while back, but he’s just been so consistent with his content, and now he’s sort of seen as the NFT content guy, so very proud of how far Wale has come, so I’ll put him up there.”
3. Chun0069 — “I will give a shout-out to someone in the Azuki community. I love his memes, and he also gives really kind of smart takes when he’s not making memes. I love Chun, a really funny guy. Those are my top three.”
What advice would you give to someone just discovering NFTs for the first time today?
“I would ask why they were interested in the first place because I think there’s so many different types of NFTs now that would point them in different directions depending on what interested them. But right now when the market is heating up, if people are joining NFTs because you can get some cheap mints and you can make some money, then I would point them to these new chains that have really blossoming ecosystems. To just participate in these communities, get some whitelist opportunities and then see which communities you vibe with and kind of kind of go from there.”
You recently retweeted a tweet that you actually put out in December 2022. Why?
I’m not building for the haters who are yelling from the outside.
I’m building for my team who’s always had my back, the thousands of supporters within the community, and the millions of future Azuki fans.
— Zagabond (@Zagabond) December 30, 2022
“Sometimes, when I reflect on how far we’ve come because we’ve gone through some major challenges throughout the past three years and I think that would have killed off most communities. I’m just very proud of how far we’ve gotten, the support that I’ve gotten, how tight-knit the community is now, and I just want to mainly show my community that they should be proud, too.”
“It’s a privilege for me to lead this community, and I’m really just building for the people that believe in me. There’s a lot of people who are never going to change their minds about what they think about Azuki or me, and that’s okay. It’s not our job to convince them. We’re going to keep putting out dope stuff. I’m still going to be here building years from now, and this is the legacy that I want to leave behind. This is how I want to inspire the world. That’s kind of why I brought that tweet back up.”
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Greg Oakford
Greg Oakford is the General Manager for Upside DAO, a leading Australian crypto & web3 co-working hub and investment fund. He is an avid NFT collector and the co-founder of NFT Fest Australia. Prior to crypto, Greg was a marketing and sponsorship specialist in the sports industry working on professional events.