Education

Azuki DAO rebrands to ‘Bean’ as it drops lawsuit against founder

Published on November 25, 2023

Update – November 25 11:45 AM UTC: This article was updated after receiving a clarification statement from an Azuki DAO spokesperson regarding its token distribution plan.

Azuki DAO, an unofficial community decentralized autonomous organization surrounding the namesake nonfungible token collection, has announced its rebranding to “Bean” as it drops a proposed lawsuit against the NFT collection’s founder, Zagabond, over a $39 million minting affair.

In a statement sent to Cointelegraph, Azuki developers said the DAO will rebrand into a memecoin project and become part of the Ethereum layer-2 Blast ecosystem. Developers also claims that Bean has also secured $10 million from “prominent investors” for its development and acceleration within the Blast ecosystem.

The proposed Bean memecoin will have a total supply of 1 billion. In a follow-up statement sent to Cointelegraph, Azuki DAO developers said that the current token supply plan displayed on its website is “out of date.” The plan previously states that 40% percent of tokens are allocated to its treasury, 50% to Azuki DAO members, and 10% to Azuki NFT creator Zagabond. The plan also previously stated that minting would only available to Azuki NFT holders, who must do so within 24 hours of the token’s launch or face “token burn.”

The follow-up statement explains that “50% of the $Bean [token] was allocated to the Azuki DAO community for the airdrop of Azuki series NFTs,” which concluded four months ago. “The remaining tokens are still in the address,” they said. “40% of $Bean [token] was allocated to the Bean Treasury, and 10% of $Bean was allocated to Zagabond, which is currently still in the address.”

The Azuki NFT collection represents 10,000 anime-themed profile pictures (PFPs). In June, a second series of 10,000 PFPs in the Azuki collection, dubbed “Elementals,” was released by Zagabond. Immediately after release, however, users noticed the close resemblance of Elemental PFPs to Azuki PFPs, thereby leading to the dilution of the latter through an increase in supply.

The price of Azuki NFTs reportedly fell 44% in the immediate aftermath of Elementals’ release. The move also triggered a community lawsuit proposal launched by Azuki DAO against creator Zagabond.

“Detailed information on financing and a roadmap for future developments will be disclosed shortly,” developers wrote.