Original author: Leek, Foresight News
Reprint: Luke, Mars Finance
On December 16, according to OpenSea data, the NFT Pudgy Penguins floor price broke through 34 ETH, now reported at 34.2 ETH (approximately 137,000 USD), with a 24-hour increase of 22.5%; its sub-series NFT Lil Pudgys broke through 4 ETH, now reported at 4.24 ETH (approximately 17,000 USD), with a 24-hour increase of 20.9%.
It is worth noting that the Pudgy Penguins series has experienced a remarkable increase in this bull market. OpenSea data shows that its floor price has risen from around 11 ETH to 34 ETH in the past month, equivalent to approximately 980,000 RMB; and its market capitalization has reached 300,000 ETH, approximately 1.19 billion USD at the time of writing.
After the arrival of the cryptocurrency bull market, various sectors began to rotate, and the NFT sector is also slowly starting up.
On December 6, the NFT blue-chip project Pudgy Penguins announced that it would release its token PENGU within 2024. The total supply is 88.88 billion, to be released on the Solana chain. Pudgy Penguins' parent company Igloo also stated that in addition to launching on Solana, the PENGU token plans to adopt a multi-chain approach, including launches on Ethereum and Abstract.
In terms of specific allocation, 25.9% of the tokens will be allocated to the Pudgy community, 24.13% will be allocated to other communities, 12.35% will be used for liquidity, 11.48% will be allocated to partners (with some unlocked after a 1-year lockup and linear unlocking over 3 years), 17.8% will be allocated to the team, 4% will be used for public sales, 0.35% will be allocated to FTT holders, and 4% will be used for Proliferation.
After the announcement, the floor price of the Pudgy Penguins series began to surge, breaking through 20 ETH from 14 ETH within two days. Following that, it broke the historical high of 23 ETH and continued to set new records. The floor price of its sub-series Lil Pudgys also rose to 2.45 ETH, creating a new historical high.
Meanwhile, the floor price of the once-leading NFT Bored Ape series has fallen to 19.88 ETH, and the floor price of its other NFT ancestor, the CryptoPunks series, has also dropped to 38.49 ETH, soon to be caught up by Pudgy Penguins.
The Pudgy Penguins series has indeed seen lows. It was initially launched in 2021 by Cole Villemain and three other colleagues, themed around cute cartoon penguins, with a total of 8,888 unique NFTs. After its launch in July 2021, it quickly became popular, becoming a hot collectible in the NFT market at that time.
However, the project faced major controversies early on, as the founding team was questioned by the community regarding funding management and project development direction, even falling into a trust crisis at one point. In 2022, against the backdrop of an overall decline in the NFT market, the popularity and floor price of Pudgy Penguins also fell, but everything changed when a new team led by internet entrepreneur Luca Netz took over.
In April 2022, Luca Netz purchased the project for 750 ETH (2.5 million USD). He restructured the leadership of the project and announced new growth plans. Under Luca Netz's leadership, Pudgy Penguins saw significant recovery in both floor price and overall brand image.
Luca Netz successfully regained market attention for Pudgy Penguins by rebuilding community trust, launching brand merchandise, and empowering NFT holders, not only achieving a price rebound but also expanding its brand influence into the real world. In May 2023, Pudgy Toys were launched, available for purchase at Target and Walmart stores as well as on Amazon, making Pudgy Penguins the best-performing NFT series during the bear market, with its floor price reaching a historical high of 23 ETH at the beginning of 2024.
However, there is a history of NFT series releasing new tokens.
In March 2022, the then-leading NFT Bored Ape Yacht Club announced a token release, with 14% airdropped to the community. As of the time of writing, the Ape token price is $1.6, far from its opening historical high of $28.
On March 30, 2024, the founder of another NFT series, mfers, announced the launch of the meme coin MFER and airdropped it to mfer holders. Later that day, MFER's price soared to over $0.03. As of the time of writing, the MFER price is around $0.026.
Will other NFT leaders also choose to release new 'Tokens' to boost their prices?
On December 16, Azuki NFT series anonymous researcher Waleswoosh posted on the X platform, asking, "What would the market look like if the blue-chip NFT project CryptoPunks released a PUNK token?"
Garga.eth (Greg Solano), co-founder of Yuga Labs, the parent company of CryptoPunks, responded, "Wow! I never thought of that."
