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

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 clarification 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sent to Cointelegraph, Azuki DAO developers said that the current token supply plan displayed on its website is “out of date.”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 said 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 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. 

Godspeed @cz_binance pic.twitter.com/jIaCj43sx8

— ZAGABOND.ETH (@ZAGABOND) November 21, 2023

Update November 25 11:20 AM UTC: This article was updated after receiving a clarification statement from an Azuki DAO spokesperson that the token distribution plan reflected on its main website at the time of publication is “out of date.” 

Related: AzukiDAO proposes to recover 20,000 ETH from Azuki founder ‘Zagabond’