A heavyweight from the once-popular NFT era is now getting into the cryptocurrency issuance game.
Pudgy Penguins was launched three years ago as a set of 8,888 NFTs featuring colorful and comical birds.
Now the team behind the project tells CoinDesk that they will release a token called PENGU on the Solana blockchain this year.
Nearly a quarter – 23.5% – of the 88 billion PENGU tokens will be reserved for owners of the project’s NFT collections, such as Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys, Pudgy Rods and more. Another 22.02% will be available to the Solana and Ethereum communities, while 12.32% will be reserved to provide liquidity on decentralized exchanges.
“With $PENGU, the millions of Pudgy Penguin fans and the hundreds of millions of people who see and share the Pudgy Penguin every day now have the opportunity to join the character and be part of The Huddle,” the team shared a statement.
Pudgy is one of the rare collections that have remained culturally relevant in the otherwise terrible NFT business after the price crash of the 2021-2022 bull market. Many NFTs lacked any real use beyond a digital show-off. It was also difficult to fully realize profits after price increases because market liquidity was often insufficient to execute orders.
The pivot comes because fun tokens and memecoins, unlike NFTs, have taken off and flourished over the past two years. Liquidity, relative cheapness, virality and ease of use are the main reasons why people have flocked to these latest popular asset classes – even though fun tokens and memecoins fundamentally represent the same idea as NFT collections: belonging to a passionate community.
Official Pudgy Penguins channels have more than 3 million followers across Instagram, X, TikTok and YouTube, and videos featuring the characters have been viewed 32 billion times on Giphy.
One of the brand’s TikTok accounts aims to spread good vibes under the name ‘Pudgy Kindness’ – popularizing it as a feel-good service in the mainstream, outside crypto circles.
Pudgy Kindness just crossed the 1 million follower mark on Tiktok. Of all the things we did at Pudgy, this is definitely my favorite. We’re going to scale this up 10x and change thousands of lives by 2025. Stay tuned 🐧👀 pic.twitter.com/Eq1PylA5QQ
— Luca Netz 🐧✳️ (@LucaNetz) November 24, 2024
It also goes beyond fencing. Parent company Igloo last year introduced Pudgy Toys, a toy line based on the digital art collection, and has since sold more than $10 million worth of collectible igloos and stuffed toys sold at major retailers including Walmart, Target, Amazon and Walgreens.
Pudgy Penguins is the third-largest NFT collection by market cap — $550 million in total — as of Thursday, data shows, trailing only CryptoPunks and Bored Apes Yacht Club. The collection came to life in 2021 and each penguin is hand drawn and has different features such as background, body, face, head and skin.