The pseudonymous founder of the popular Azuki non-fungible token (NFT) project revealed his troubled history with abandoned projects on Monday night, sending NFT Twitter into an uproar and dropping the price of the collection.
The founder, known as Twitter user Zagabond, described his NFT history in a blog post detailing his involvement in the Cryptophunks, Tendies and Cryptozunks projects, all of which were abandoned by their original founding team.
Zagabond attributes much of Azuki's success to learning from the failures of the other projects.
"In these formative times, it's important that the community encourages creators to innovate and experiment," Zagabond said in his blog post. "Plus, every experiment brings important insights."
The announcement was met with pushback from the broader NFT community, as many believed the information would be released via on-chain snooping in the coming days.
The post reignited the debate over the transparency of NFT founders, a debate that peaked in February when the true identity of the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders was revealed by BuzzFeed.
The price of an Azuki on secondary marketplace OpenSea dropped from 19 ETH (about $42,000) to as low as 10.9 ETH (about $24,000), but has since recovered to 12 ETH (about $31,000) at the time of writing.
Azukis have turned over more than 200,000 ETH (about $526 million) in total since their release in February, the sixth-highest sales volume of any NFT project.