NFT project Azuki fell to the altar? The image collision incident once again plunged into a crisis of trust?

According to news on June 28, the NFT project Azuki’s new series of Elemental Beans completed the pre-sale. The data on the chain shows that a total of 5,862 addresses have obtained it, and there is no margin for public sale. **However, the "image collision" incident caused by the newly released NFT has plunged the official into a crisis of trust. **

**How did the new series of NFT project Azuki "overturn"? **

In January 2022, Azuki entered the NFT market for the first time. With its unique Japanese animation style, Azuki quickly won the favor of many NFT enthusiasts, and soon became the emerging leader that has attracted much attention.

During this period, **Azuki community launched various NFT protocol standards and novel gameplays in the field of Web3.0, such as ERC721A protocol, PBT protocol, NFT fragmentation, Azuki partner BEANZ series, etc. **

But the new series of Elemental Beans released this time has completely overturned the car.

As you can see from the picture below, the newly released NFT series are completely copycats of their own, and the same is true. All major Web3 communities are cutting leeks in the "Diss" project.

Image from the Web3 community

There are also friends in the community complaining that the newly released NFT this time is completely "take off your clothes" and sell it again.

Image from the Web3 community

Azuki co-founder 2PMFLOW responded that community members pointed out that the same image appeared in the Elementals open map, saying that this is a technical failure, because the event log of the data provider is outdated due to the reorganization of the Ethereum block, resulting in the metadata of a small number of Tokens being wrong deal with. **The team is working hard to restore the correct images and metadata. **

In response to the issue of Elementals casting and opening maps, Azuki's official Discord issued an announcement saying, "We have heard all the feedback clearly. Team members are working out what needs to be done next. You can look forward to a statement later tonight and next steps. We know the next step is important and we want to get it right. We understand everyone's feelings and frustrations."

**However, the market doesn't think so. **

This crisis of public opinion had a direct negative impact on Azuki. **Due to the collapse of community sentiment and the decline of product value, Azuki has lost the trust and support of some users and investors, and the Azuki series has fallen across the board. **

It can be seen that there are two main reasons why Azuki has been criticized and sold:

(1) The gap between the previous publicity and the actual situation is too large

On June 24th, the Azuki project team released a beautiful trailer about Azuki Elementals, which has more than 1 million views on Twitter. In addition to the Hilumia metaverse plan announced by the Azuki project team at the beginning of this year and various previous offline activities, The Azuki community has very high expectations for Azuki Elementals.

Azuki Elementals trailer screenshot

However, after Azuki Elementals opened the picture, the Azuki community found that it was just an "imitation disk" of Azuki. The project party spent so much time on publicity, but failed to deliver a product that satisfied the community.

(2) Azuki Elementals own problem:

Quality issues:

Compared with Azuki's beloved art and modeling, the PFP image presented by Azuki Elementals has many flaws: the character's mouth is shifted, inexplicable black pixel blocks, etc., coupled with the style very similar to Azuki, let the participants in the casting of Azuki Elementals The players don't feel any sincerity from Azuki. On the contrary, Azuki Elementals is considered to be a disguised additional issuance of Azuki, which reduces the demand for Azuki, so the Azuki community began to sell Azuki.

technical problem:

Azuki Elementals has multiple NFTs that store the same metadata, causing Elementals holders to find that their Azuki Elementals NFT is exactly the same as other people's NFTs except for the id number. Although Azuki co-founder 2PMFLOW responded that the event log of the data provider was invalidated due to the reorganization of the Ethereum block, and the metadata will be re-uploaded later, Azuki NFT players have lost trust in the project party. Because this approach challenges ordinary NFT players' perception of NFT ownership and decentralization, it is not accepted by the community.

Looking at Azuki Elementals and the contract code, we can see that the contract holder can replace all the pictures of Azuki Elementals by simply writing a new gallery link path.

In fact, the only data currently owned by Azuki Elementals holders is the NFT number, and the metadata storage address currently points to the project’s private cloud server, which is currently denied access). This indicates that the displayed pictures and attributes do not belong to the user, and the project party does not intend to use IPFS services or directly store related data on the chain.

Brother Maji who bought the bottom and the user who was "fished"

According to the data on the chain, when the prices of Azuki, Beanz, Elemental, etc. are all falling, machibigbrother.eth is buying Azuki series NFT against the market.

However, some Azuki users were attacked by phishing attacks again when the value of NFT depreciated.

According to the Beosin EagleEye security risk monitoring, early warning and blocking platform monitoring of the blockchain security audit company Beosin, on June 28, 2023, a user's AZUKI#8468 and AZUKI#8964 were stolen. The victim visited the phishing website carefully constructed by the attacker, and clicked on an operation that needs to be confirmed through the wallet (may be disguised as receiving rewards, etc.), resulting in being attacked. **

The Beosin security team analyzed and found that the attacker induced the victim to call the Upgrade To function, modifying the implementation contract address of the victim's OpenSea account proxy contract. Since the implementation contract has been modified into a malicious contract, the attacker can directly call the contract to transfer the victim's NFT.

After writing this, we still need to be alert to all users to guard against phishing attacks.

We recommend the following **Beosin anti-phishing plugin to all readers and friends, which can identify most phishing websites in the Web3 field and protect the security of your wallet and NFT assets. **

Anti-phishing plug-in download:

At the same time, we used Beosin KYT to track and found that the proceeds of 20,000 ETH obtained from the sale of NFT have all been transferred to the multi-signed contract 0x2aE6B0630EBb4D155C6e04fCB16840FFA77760AA, and the funds have not been moved as of the time of publication. **

Write at the end:

At present, the "condemnation" of Azuki in the ** community is still not over. If this crisis is not properly resolved, it may have a long-term impact on Azuki's brand image and reputation. **Therefore, Azuki needs to take proactive steps to resolve this issue, restore confidence in the market, and build a stronger and more reliable brand image.