Azuki

Azuki began at Chiru Labs, a Los Angeles company. Today Azuki Labs, the company behind Azuki, runs it. Its four founders used pseudonyms: Zagabond, who had worked in business development at Google, Location TBA, who says he was a software engineer at Facebook, Hoshiboy and 2pm.flow. Zagabond now goes by his name, Alex Q. Xu, and leads Azuki Labs as CEO. Arnold Tsang, a lead character designer on Overwatch, designed the characters and joined full time in 2022.

Azuki, 10,000 anime avatars on Ethereum, launched in January 2022, and its public sale sold out in minutes. Holders got a free airdrop of BEANZ that spring. In May 2022 Zagabond wrote about three earlier NFT projects he had started and left, CryptoPhunks, Tendies and CryptoZunks, and the post drew a backlash. That October the company auctioned eight gold-plated skateboards, its first physical-backed tokens, which tie an object to an NFT through a scannable chip. Hoodies and pendants made with AMBUSH used the same chips.

In April 2023 it paired BEANZ with LINE Friends characters. That June it released Azuki Elemental Beans, which holders open to reveal an Azuki Elemental of fire, water, earth or lightning. Half of the 20,000 beans went free to Azuki holders. Collectors said the new characters looked too close to the originals, and the team said it had "missed the mark." Later it made the anime anthology Enter the Garden with Dentsu and joined the Arbitrum Foundation on AnimeChain, a network for anime fans.

In January 2025 Azuki bought Anime.com and became the launch partner of ANIME, a token issued by the Animecoin Foundation that holders of Azuki, Elementals and BEANZ could claim. As Azuki Labs, it released the first set of its trading card game in June 2026, with a second set due that November.