Looks like the monkeys are out and the penguins are in.
Bored Apes Yacht Club, the collection of 10,000 cartoon monkey NFTs that became wildly popular in the months following their creation in April 2021, has seen its trading interests dwindle in recent months. First hit around the same time as Bored Apes, Pudgy Penguins continue to roll.
This trend is reflected in the convergence of the floor prices of the two projects. The floor price of a collection is the lowest price for which a collector could acquire a piece from the collection on secondary markets. As of Monday morning, Bored Ape’s floor dollar price was $57,469, while Pudgy Penguins’ was $51,730, according to data from NFT Price Floor.
Read more: ApeFest marred by reports of eye and skin injuries
What some have called a potential “flapping” is made possible in part by increased trading interest in the Pudgy Penguins. The project has seen more than 2,000 sales in the past month, compared to 886 for Bored Apes, per NFT Price Floor.
Data from pseudonymous researcher NFTstats.eth on
In the meantime, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz has been working to chart a path for Pudgies as a more comprehensive intellectual property brand. Netz raised a $9 million seed round for this vision in May 2023.
“Luca Netz is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in marketing and e-commerce. He has a clear vision for Pudgy [Penguins]: to transform it into a very successful intellectual property brand,” Nicolás Lallement, co-founder of NFT Price Floor, told Blockworks. “He seems to be [successfully] carrying out his plan thus far.”
Pudgy Penguins released toy versions of its NFTs, which went on sale in Walmart stores in September 2023.
Read more: Pudgy Penguins are waddling their way into 2,000 Walmart locations
More recently, Pudgy Penguins teased the open-world game Pudgy World, which is currently scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2024. The game will make use of Pudgy’s NFT intellectual property and will apparently be compatible with the Apple Vision Pro.
Bored Ape Yacht Club, meanwhile, is owned by Yuga Labs, which saw a hiccup in one of its major initiatives last week.
Yuga recently developed a metaverse called Otherside. Last week, an Otherside-developed game called Legends of the Mara announced that users could claim collectibles they earned while playing. Users rushed to mint the NFTs on Ethereum, but higher gas costs caused some to end up paying large amounts of gas for the free collectible.
Yuga’s Chief Gaming Officer Spencer Tucker said the studio would give all affected users another free collectible to offset the high gas costs, but the game’s community members complained that this would dilute the value of the initial NFT run.
A few hours later, Yuga changed course and simply refunded the gas costs. “Thank you for letting us know and sharing with us,” said Greg Solano, co-founder of Yuga Labs.
Development teams aside, there may be a more abstract force contributing to the fall of Bored Ape and the rise of Pudgy Penguins: coolness.
“Yuga should make the world’s monkeys cool again, just as they were only a short time ago. Get @BoredApeYC in the [mainstream media] headlines again!”, wrote a user on X.