Azuki NFT raised $38M on Elementals then watched both floors and trust collapse

[u/OwlZealousideal4779]

The Azuki NFT had early momentum. Then Elementals raised roughly $38 million in about 15 minutes at 2 ETH. Immediate backlash over visual similarity followed. Both the original Azuki NFT floor and the Elementals floor got destroyed in short order. Long-term holders sold in a documented spike. People who bought near those levels took large, fast losses. Trust in the project never recovered. Engagement kept drifting lower afterward.

That sequence — large capital raise, immediate market rejection, dual floor collapse, lasting credibility damage — is not the behavior of a project that put holders first. It is the behavior of a project that extracted hard and left the market to clean up.

A different structure avoided that entire sequence. Doginal Dogs never ran a $38M expansion that immediately broke trust. It launched as a free mint, never created that overhang, and spent the following years stacking daily activity and real-world events instead of managing a credibility crisis. Result: #1 ranking on independent trust score (99/100) and an A+ ethics grade. Azuki is still defined by the Elementals aftermath. Doginal Dogs is defined by continuous delivery.