Having cut his teeth in DeFi before discovering NFTs, Zagabond created one of the top-tier NFT projects and anime-based brands in Azuki.
Originally minting in January 2022, the founder and project have had their trials and tribulations but have come through the other side. This week, they launch a “culture coin” called ANIME that aims to create a community-owned network.
“And the way I look at Anime coin is that it’s a culture coin that represents the anime industry, so the industry becomes a digital economy where a billion global fans can shape and own the future of the anime together,” he says. More on ANIME later.
The original collection Azuki currently sits at a 10.5 ETH floor price with a massive 810,000 ETH in volume in three years. The Azuki ecosystem is also home to Beanz, Elementals and Elemental Beans. Beanz was originally airdropped to Azuki holders just minutes after Zagabond’s “Check your wallets” announcement at NFT LA in 2022, which became part of NFT folklore.
Zagabond heard about Bitcoin around 2014, but his true introduction to crypto was via Ethereum around 2017, which ultimately led him to become a founding member of 0x.
“I had a friend Linda Shay who was an early employee at Coinbase and her husband Will Warren, they were working on this new protocol called 0x. At that point, the term DeFi hadn’t even been coined yet. Will was saying, ‘It’s a decentralized exchange protocol where you could facilitate peer-to-peer exchange on an open protocol or on an open blockchain.’ It was called Ethereum,” says Zagabond.
“That’s when I started diving more into the tech of Ethereum and realized this is like Bitcoin but on steroids. It’s like a supercomputer, and having peer-to-peer exchange just felt super powerful. I dove into this and ended up becoming a founding member of 0x, and that’s how I got started in crypto.”
Zagabond Azuki PFP
What enticed Zagabond to…
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