The Animecoin Foundation announced that it will launch its culture coin, ANIME, on Ethereum and Arbitrum this month. Linked to the popular NFT project Azuki, the Animecoin Foundation will issue a total of 10 billion ANIME tokens, with nearly 77% of them circulating on the first day. The Foundation’s goal is to utilize the token launch to transform the anime ecosystem into a community-owned creative economy, thereby aligning incentives for creators and fans within the growing industry, which the Animecoin Foundation estimates could reach $60 billion by 2030.
Over half of the total ANIME supply is designated for the Web3 community, spearheaded by Azuki, an early contributor to the Animecoin Foundation. The Azuki community will receive 37.5% of the supply, equivalent to 3.75 billion tokens, all of which will be fully tradable upon launch. An additional 13% is allocated to the “Community Cultivation” segment, a pool of tokens to be managed by ANIME token holders and the future AnimeDAO for funding community incentives and initiatives.
A portion of the 2% of the ANIME supply reserved for partner communities will be distributed to other Anime-related projects, users of the web3 analytics platform Kaito, and select Arbitrum projects. Despite the long-awaited arrival of the ANIME token, the official announcement spurred a surge in the Azuki NFT collection. In the past 24 hours, the project’s floor price, which represents the lowest listed price for an asset on the marketplace, increased by nearly 9% to 13.67 ETH or $41,505 according to NFT Price Floor. Similarly, the companion collections Azuki Elementals and Beanz also experienced respective jumps of 9.6% and 7.4%.
In March 2024, the Animecoin Foundation, in partnership with Azuki, revealed that it had chosen Arbitrum as a launch partner for AnimeChain, a blockchain utilizing Arbitrum’s layer-2 solution to facilitate the on-chain existence of the global anime network. Anime.com, a project developed by Azuki on the AnimeChain testnet, initiated its waitlist in September 2024. Azuki, founded in 2022 by Los Angeles-based Chiru Labs, stands as one of the most prominent and valuable Ethereum NFT projects. [Edited by Andrew Hayward]