Blue Chip Azuki launches NFT photorealistic collection to celebrate Shanghai Garden Tour

In March, NFT blue chip Azuki launched a new collection in collaboration with virtual reality-based fashion brand NXT Labs. The collection celebrates Azuki's offline community events, Garden Tours, and specifically the Shanghai Garden Tour, the first stop on a five-country tour of Asia. The collection consists of apparel items such as short-sleeved T-shirts and hoodies, with the man-to-man sweatshirt priced at around KRW 700,000, and is limited to 30 pieces per day. In addition, Azuki's PBT (Physical Backed Token), a standardized technology for linking to the real world, is applied. The NFT is also utilized as an entrance ticket to Azuki's own metaverse community, Hirumia, which has great value. It is unknown if Azuki will collaborate with NXT on more products beyond the Garden Tour Tokyo collection, which is scheduled to be released on April 8th.

Azuki has been commercializing its PBT (Physical-Bound Token) since 2022, with the first commercialization being the 'Twin Tiger', an 8s-90s Suzanne jacket that is the core of its branding, in 2022. The company has since proposed PBT as a technology standard and launched the Golden Skateboard, a physical-linked collection, which was auctioned off. The collection consisted of only 9 pieces and raised about 2.5 million USD, which was a phenomenal turnover and attracted attention from the industry. A subsequent collection co-published with street fashion brand Embush sold for 0.37 ETH (about $1.7 million) per hoodie, proving the value of the technical standard. The core of PBT is a proof method using NFTs to link the owner to the real world. All you need to do is scan the NFT chip embedded in the product through the app provided by Azuki or the official website. It aims to make S2O (Scan to Own) very simple with a perfect 1:1 matching system that automatically links with registered blockchain wallets and issues NFTs that can prove ownership to your wallet.

As one of the core focuses of the upcoming digital markets such as RWA and STO, physical proof of linkage aims to be bidirectional, connecting two different worlds, so decentralized proof technology based on blockchain technology is very suitable. Industry insiders agree that physical linkage technology has not yet been standardized globally, and it is difficult to find examples in Korea, so technology development and examples are needed.