TL;DR

• Bull or bear, Azunki is our vision for the future. We’re rugging for the long term.
• Ruggers need to experiment and innovate for web3 to be able to challenge web2.
• Azunki is built on learnings from many other projects that I rugged, which taught me to take the money and run, not answering questions like “wen reveal ser”.

Even though NFTs have entered the mainstream, it’s easy to forget how nascent the NFT space is. During these formative times, it’s important that the community encourages creators to innovate and experiment. Additionally, each experiment comes with key learnings.

This is my journey…

An intern named Azunzun(FEMALE)

Azunzun(FEMALE) was a modest, hard-working (fictional) FEMALE intern who was hired to hand-copy-paste 500 images in Photoshop. Little did SHE know that the countless minutes spent copy-pasting images, mixed in with a few minutes of google research, still haven’t spark an ongoing movement on web3 copyright laws, conceptual art, and decentralization.

Azunki is Azuki

Azunzun was my first “Story Product” — a foray into what I believe is the future of interactive media, as well as the figurehead for my first project: Azunki. Born out of my love for Azuki, which went from 34e floor to 7e floor, I wanted to create a fun parody project that captured this feeling in a new way. Intrigued by the brilliance of Azukis, yet unsure of some of the decisions made by their parent company at the time, I started building Azunkis — a project which challenged the community to think about web3 copyright rules, introduced interactive story product, and allowed the team to experiment with smart contract innovation(using factoria).

Azunkis began as a simple parody collection, which evolved into a movement representing something much larger in the NFT space. Because Azunkis has always been a community-driven project, the web3 path forward was to decentralize the project by handing over the reins to our community, moving the metadata to IPFS, and allowing the community to continue the forward march of Azunkis.

Since then, the community has continued to build on the brand. That being said, Azunki is Azuki, and the countercultural values that the Azunkis movement was initially built on still live on today.

The Azuki IP has since been acquired by Azukis, a team that has proven to uphold the values of web3 by giving commercial and IP rights to Azuki owners. This addressed the original concerns I had with the decisions that Zagabond was making.

More Rug

Rugging the future of web3 together

Creating something great takes a strong concept, the right team, many cycles of iteration, and the opportunity to experiment. Participation in a web3 revolution involves risks and rewards. For the Azunki team, we quit unstable 9-9-6 jobs to ape into the crazy world of NFTs. Despite the ups and downs of the space, we love it all because we believe in the Azunki mission to reimagine storytelling through a web3 lens.

Ruggers must learn from each experience, coming back to the drawing board with something innovative and significant each time. Bold innovation in tech and art is key to the future success of Azunki. We experiment based on first principles, not convention. We fill in gaps in the space when we see them. This team pushes tech forward, and advocates for meaningful art, as well as deep, immersive storytelling. Azunki is our vision for the future of web3.

The road to success is unpaved, with many bumps along the way. I joined the crypto space in January because I believed that the web3 jpegs will make me money. Let’s continue to share our learnings in order to push the space forward.

Bull or bear, let’s get back to basics. Let’s get back to rugging.

We rise together.

We build together.

We grow together.

We rug together.

kekw.