everyone believes that nfts are a frozen Wasteland and attention has long since shifted to the next big thing however some plump little penguins have waddled back onto the scene and made serious ways with one of the biggest airdrops in crypto history the question is what’s so special about Pudgy penguins and why are they thriving when so many other species of nfts have faded away well today we’re diving into the rise fall and Resurgence of this Frosty phenomenon and telling you everything you need to know about the pudgy penguins and their habitat so grab your flippers and let’s dive in before we begin you need to know that I’m not a financial investment or penguin professional and nothing in this video should be taken as Financial investment or animal advice this video is purely for entertainment and educational purposes only now with that out of the way let’s get into it pudy Penguins was founded by four college students in July 2021 the project began as an ethereum based nftd project with the intention to launch an educational nft book a video game and an ecosystem token the pudy Penguins nft collection consists of chubby cartoon penguins with unique sets of features they were launched back when the bull market hype around nfts was at its absolute Peak as such the entire collection sold out in under 20 minutes within a week the floor price had shot up from around 0.0 eth to a whopping 2.4 eth our trusty calculator tells us that’s an 8X in price oh and for anyone wondering the floor price represents the lowest price you’ll pay for a single nft in that collection as was the norm with nfts back then some people paid crazy amounts too um here’s an example notice anything interesting about this little guy over here this plain looking penguin happens to be the only one angled to the left making it the rarest of the bunch as such one investor happily parted with 225 eth roughly 2.5 million at today’s prices it’s now valued at a whopping 4 100 e only in crypto hey folks pudy Penguins even Drew mainstream media attention gracing the cover of the New York Times and to add to the excitement a pudgy penguin holders where air dropped a mysterious nft of an egg that would hatch on Christmas day in 2021 however things quickly went downhill just months after the launch tensions Rose between the founding team and one of the pudgy Penguins disc called mods named Darth who accused them of misappropriating funds after allegedly being offered just one ether to keep quiet Darth refused and publicly left the project in December 2021 not uh good luck to be honest this knocked the confidence of an otherwise enthusiastic Community who are known as uh hudders to make things worse that egg nft which hatched on Christmas day turned out to be a fishing Rod yes really not an animal a fishing rod but hey they were misspelled as a Rog so that’s got to count for something right unsurprisingly everyone was pretty disappointed with this and accused the founders of not delivering on earlier promises the founders released the little paji collection that same December as an attempt to appease the community but it was uh too little too late the final nail in the coffin came when an anonymous nft influencer alleged the team were planning to rug the Project’s treasury the following month what’s crazy is that this influencer shared screenshots showing they were also offered 20% of the company in exchange for 4,000 eth when they refused the team offered 100% equity for just 888 eth and if that doesn’t scream desperation well I don’t know what does the community was pretty pissed off at this point and in January 2022 the hudders ended up Ting the original founders with a community takeover or CTO which is widely regarded as one of the most successful CTO in crypto history the community’s Huddle game was strong and this led to the project being bought by Luca Nets who managed to completely turn things around for context Luca is an entrepreneur and longtime pudy Penguins fan he purchased the company in April 2022 for 750 e worth around $2.5 million at that time after Luca took over there were two funding rounds a 9 million seed round in May 2023 and an 11 million funding round in July 2024 the project is now overseen by the parent company Igloo Inc which was established slightly ironically perhaps in Miami Florida in 2024 and is where Luca also serves as CEO oh and by the way if you think this video is flipping great so far waddle over to those like And subscribe buttons and give them a little pick then slide over to that notification Bell to make sure that you don’t miss any more videos like this so then how does the pudgy Penguins Project work well at its core there’s the original nft collection of 8,888 pudgy Penguins each penguin is uniquely generated from over 150 handrawn traits at the time of shooting uh pudgy Penguins has a floor price of over 23 eth and there are also two smaller pudy collections the first is the aforementioned little Pudgies which has a much higher supply of 22,2 122 nfds and a much lower floor price of around 2.4 eth at the time of this video of course there’s also the pudgy rods collection that hatched out of the eggs we mentioned earlier these rods or rugs have a supply of just under 7,400 and a floor price of around 1 E pudgy Penguins holders have also had the option to receive several soulbound tokens which for anyone wondering are non-transferable tokens that live permanently in a wallet and represent a unique identity these soulbound tokens include true penu which were aird dropped to Holders of the main collection to recognize their early adoption and penu pins which are sort of like medals given to reward outstanding community members but the pudgy Penguins team has expanded its revenue streams far beyond nfts and other digital tokens there’s a whole array of pudy penguins merch available on the pudy Penguins website and even more on the website of the parent company Igloo Inc you can even get pudgy penguin toys available from major US best retailers like Walmart and Target according to CEO Luca Nets the project sold over a million units of these in the first 12 months alone and thanks to the pudgy Penguins team launching something called overpass IP nft holders can participate in licensing deals so your penguin nft could have its own physical toy and you’d earn a 5% royalty for each toy sold with your design if that wasn’t enough pudgy Penguins also has its own recently released trading card game called Vibes and is actively working on multiple pudgy related games too uh more about those a bit later in any case everything we’ve just covered is exactly why the brand has become so successful each product brings an extra layer of marketing and this raised awareness draws more people to the ecosystem boosting the company’s revenue and this has helped the project stay resilient even when the nft winter was at its awareness in crypto faster than the promise of free money and as you’ll have no doubt seen a pudgy Penguins recently launched a native token called penu on the salana blockchain this came as a bit of a surprise to many because the pudy Penguins team is actively developing its own blockchain called abstract but according to interviews with Luca he had a gut feeling that the time was now and that abstract simply wasn’t ready Pingu was designed to reach as many people as possible and provide a more accessible entry point into the pudgy Penguins ecosystem and this is why Luca chose to launch penu on Solana since it’s arguably the blockchain with the most engagement at this stage well that and the fact that he opened a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards and the first card he saw was called soul and Luna can’t argue with that logic anyway penu was claimable for holders of any pudgy nfts now specifically pudgy Penguins holders could claim around 2 million tokens little pudgy holders could claim around 202,000 tokens and Pudgy rod holders could claim around 81,000 tokens however Pingu was claimable for longtime users of ethereum and salana over 1 million wallets created before 2024 were eligible to claim penu tokens with the amounts varying based on activity there’s an 88 a claiming period from the tokens launch on the 17th of December which means the window closes on the 15th of March so if you’re watching this video around the time of the release it might be worth dusting off those old wallets and seeing if you’re eligible 21 billion of the 23 billion tokens have been claimed so far so it seems a few old wallets still need to be woken up that reminds me if you’ve ever purchased a pudgy penguin’s toy then I’ve got great news for you you Alca revealed in an interview that toy holders will be able to claim exclusive rewards sometime in the future so uh watch the space and hold that little sucker tight now you’d be forgiven for thinking that such a massive airdrop would result in pangu’s price immediately tanking since a lot of recipients would have sold as soon as they received the tokens however penu was catapulted immediately into the top 100 cryptos by market cap and at the time of shooting its pric has actually remained remarkably resilient and this naturally brings us to the tokenomics since we’ve already covered the nfts we’ll focus on penu a penu is an SPL token on Solano that was designed to expand the community by reaching as many people as possible which it achieved via that massive airdrop in keeping with the Project’s love for weird numbers penu has a maximum supply of 88 bill888 , 888,246 of the supply and these are roughly allocated as follows 18% to the team 11% to the company 26% to the community and 24% to other communities it’s honestly unclear which of these poths the pudgy airdrop will fall under the pudgy Community or others any who 12% is kept aside for liquidity 4% for public goods such as Charity work 4% for proliferation presumably marketing and interestingly 0.35% has been set aside for ftt holders you know the exchange token of the now defunct FTX it’s worth noting that any airdrop tokens that aren’t claimed by March will be burned oh and note that the allocation for the team and the community just under 30% in total is subject to a one-year cliff and a threeyear vest although it’s basically just a meme coin for now pangu will eventually serve as the native utility token for the ecosystem given holders perks like voting in community governance pengu’s price flew up over 5 7 cents when the token went live and crashed just as quickly to 2.3 cents as people sold out and I mean who could blame them right for many people this was hundreds sometimes even thousands of dollars in free crypto that was given away at a time when a lot of people’s bags are down bad despite this selling though penu still has a market cap in the billions of dollars putting it comfortably in the top 100 cryptos and this means that as far as airdrops go penu is not only the largest in history it’s also one of the most successful it’ll be fascinating to see where the tokens price heads in the coming weeks and months unfortunately it’s a bit too soon to say how big penu could get and there’s also not much precedent we can use to get a sense of this obviously penu is quite similar to apoin which was launched by the board ape yach Club nft collection the thing is that AP coin only hit a market cap of around 5 billion in the previous cycle and if penu is following apoin one cycle behind that would be only a 2X from here and we reckon that penu could in fact grow much larger than that and this ties right into the pudgy Penguins road map or as they call it the quest map we should caveat right away though that the latest Quest map was released around the time that Luca took over the project way back in 2022 so it’s a little outdated although interestingly the project website features a fun little pipedia section and if you search for Quest map you’ll see this section that suggests a new road map is in development it could be nothing but it may be worth keeping an eye out nonetheless regardless what we do know is that the team is actively building out some pretty exciting additions to the pudgy Penguins ecosystem uh perhaps the most ambitious of these is the aformentioned abstract an ethereum layer 2 that leverages zero knowledge rollups now I know what you’re thinking great another layer too but the thing that sets abstract apart is its focus on engagement first specifically there are three stages with stage one focusing on gaming social media Collectibles IP trading and petting stage two will expand abstracts offerings by moving into things like like defi deepen media payments and digital Commerce and stage three is where abstract will create a massive economy focusing on online banking taxes Dows Credit Insurance data and more to call this ambitious is something of an understatement now aside from abstract the pudgy Penguins team plans to continue striking Partnerships with retailers to sell licensed toys and there’s also talk of expanding the utility of the penu token although this has not been officially confirmed for now but back to that Venture into gaming not only has the team just released a pretty sweet arcade game but there are also four additional games being developed and these are pudy party pudgy World pudgy life and Pudgy fishing pudgy world is perhaps the most exciting it’s an open world story-driven game built on ZK sync an ethereum layer 2 that allows nft and toy holders to complete their Journey with customizable characters pudgy party will apparently be a AAA Mobile game that aims to give a fresh Take On The Knockout Royale genre making it a competitor to popular games like fall guys and then there’s pudgy life which will be a mobile Simulator game as for pudgy fishing this was teased way back in 2021 when the pudgy rods were first released but nothing ever materialized at the time though the idea was that a pudgy Rod would be required to play the game as since your penguin wouldn’t be able to fish without it to be honest though this probably isn’t the best approach to getting a game off the ground nobody is going to pay thousands of dollars to buy a digital rod to fish for digital fish and this of course brings us to the challenges that pudgy Penguins could indeed face and the first of these is the volatility of the nft market while pudgy Penguins has proven to be a resilient project in the nft winter it’s hard to say if the nft market will ever experience a full Revival to the levels we saw in 2021 this uncertainty could create a lot of volatility in this space which could be problematic now for example if the floor price were to suddenly Fall by 50% as it did when the pangu token was first launched this could turn the focus of nft investors to other projects and this relates to the Second Challenge and that’s competition the team’s Vision has helped the project to become a massive success but you can bet there’ll be other potential rival projects watching and taking notes basically other emerging nft projects could begin to compete and steal market share away from pudgy penguins and this is especially true if the nft space does experience a full Revival I recall that the board 8 Yacht Club is working on something similar this ties into the third challenge which is revenue dependency put simply pudgy penguin’s business model relies on brand awareness and in large part this means leaning on licensing for things like toys and merchandise the thing is this plan not only requires solid execution but there also needs to be an actively engaged target audience that’s willing to buy these things in the first place if attention Fades and sales plummet the major retailers we mentioned earlier like Walmart and Target would likely remove these toys from the shelves and this would be a major blow to py penguin’s revenue and brand awareness and this relates to the final Challenge and that’s the high expectations that have been set by the project the community has shown that they’re strong and resilient after all it’s why they’re referred to as hudders but there’s always the risk that unexpected setbacks could bring old issues to the Sur surface so to speak not only that but there are high expectations for pudgy penguins and Igloo Inc CEO Luca Nets and there’s a risk of possible burnout after all Luca is only 21 years young at the time of shooting and he’s already working 12 hours a day 6 days a week to be fair though the project has gone from strength to strength under Luca’s leadership put simp compl this guy he can cook so whatever challenges the pudgy Penguins team finds themselves up against against Luca’s vision and the community of hudders back in him will likely be more than prepared the catch is that pudy Penguins has already grown very big the nfts cost tens of thousands of dollars and the penu token already has a market cap in the billions this means that the gains both are likely to see won’t be as large in percentage terms at least relative to other cryptos that haven’t had their day in the Sun or rather on the ice but believe it or not why don’t you watch our latest video right over here or are you looking for a crypto exchange you may want to check out our video on the top five exchanges right over here until next time this is Nick signing off [Music]
