NFTs have once again returned to the public eye.
The floor price of Pudgy Penguins NFTs surged nearly 35% in a week, reaching 12.75 ETH, approximately $38,000; the price of $PENGU has increased nearly tenfold from its bottom, with a market cap exceeding $1.8 billion. This kind of excitement hasn't been seen in the NFT space for a long time.
What’s even more surprising is that this price rebound is neither due to a popular narrative nor a collective shout-out from KOLs.
The real starting point was a somewhat overly tacit "avatar change movement."
On that day, Crypto giants changed to penguin avatars
On July 12, Coinbase changed its X account avatar to a chubby penguin, captioning it "New avatar, who doesn't like it?" Following this, multiple crypto projects including OpenSea, MoonPay, Polkadot, EigenCloud, and OKX successively adopted Pudgy Penguins-themed avatars, as if they had rehearsed it in advance.
With a series of avatar changes, the NFT floor price rose, and the trading volume of $PENGU immediately skyrocketed, with market expectations for potential upcoming collaborations rapidly heating up. Amid this wave of avatar changes, core member of the penguin community @broskisol declared, "I heard that Pudgy Penguins will soon officially announce one of the biggest collaborations in Web3 history."
In fact, this is not the first time Pudgy Penguins has had so many well-known projects in the industry stand behind it.
Rewind to April 26 of this year, World Penguin Day.
The official account of Pudgy Penguins released a commemorative poster, and then a host of Web3 institutions including MetaMask, Uniswap, Magic Eden, MoonPay, Phantom, Binance.US, and Gemini joined in, creating a unified scene that sparked huge discussions.
This collective action seems to have evolved beyond mere meme celebration; it resembles a form of "position expression": Pudgy Penguins has become part of the industry's consensus.
Behind this collective appearance is actually the resource network that Pudgy Penguins has accumulated over the years through deep cultivation in the industry.
Holders of Pudgy Penguins NFTs span major infrastructure projects, public chain ecosystems, and investment institutions, covering the nerve endings of Web3. Projects like Dymension, Omni Network, LayerZero, and ZkSync have even directly airdropped tokens to Pudgy Penguins NFT holders.
A bell ringing by an old finance person, the appearance of a penguin
This influence has also gradually seeped into traditional finance.
VanEck, a long-established private investment management company founded in 1955, not only changed its Twitter avatar to Pudgy Penguins as early as 2024 but also brought the chubby penguin to the Nasdaq stage on June 23 of this year, ringing the opening bell that day.
On that day, Pudgy Penguins' CEO Luca wrote on his LinkedIn, "Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto."
When we mention the word "finance," what comes to mind are institutions, cold data, and blue and white tones—no emotions, no visual anchors. Wall Street's bull is too far removed from young people, bank logos are too dull, and even Elon Musk has to rely on a Shiba Inu to maintain attention. Pudgy Penguins offers another option, an image that is easy to understand without professional knowledge and is charming enough.
As the Crypto industry gradually moves towards compliance and mainstream acceptance, Web3 is no longer just a club for engineers and VCs; it must learn to explain itself to the young people on TikTok. An image that is memorable, encourages merchandise purchases, and can be embedded in product app launch pages may determine the future of this industry more than a new protocol.
What Pudgy Penguins aims to do is not just pump NFTs or tokens. They have greater ambitions; they are vying for a higher-level positioning—who can become the visual spokesperson for the new generation of financial narratives.
Perhaps in the future, Pudgy Penguins will not only be the Face of Crypto but also the Face of Finance.
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