$PENGU's Meteoric Rise: The Little Penguin Set to Become the Face of Finance

NFT has once again returned to people's attention.

The floor price of Pudgy Penguins NFT has surged by nearly 35% in a week, reaching 12.75 ETH, equivalent to about $38,000; the price of $PENGU has almost 10x from its bottom, with a market cap exceeding $18 billion. This excitement hasn't been seen in the NFT space for a long time.

What's even more surprising is that this price rebound was neither due to a popular narrative nor a collective shill by KOLs.

The real trigger was a somewhat exaggerated "avatar change movement."

On That Day, Crypto Giants All Donned Penguin Avatars

On July 12, Coinbase changed their X account avatar to a chubby penguin with the caption "New Avatar, who doesn't like it." Following suit, several crypto projects such as OpenSea, MoonPay, Polkadot, EigenCloud, OKX, and more successively changed to Pudgy Penguins-themed avatars, as if they had rehearsed in advance.

Following a series of avatar changes, the NFT floor price rose, and the $PENGU trading volume immediately surged, with the market quickly warming up to the expectations of potential collaborations. In the midst of this avatar change frenzy, a core member of the penguin community, @broskisol, hinted, "I heard that Pudgy Penguins will soon announce the largest collaboration in Web3 history."

Actually, this is not the first time Pudgy Penguins has had so many prominent projects in the industry stand up for it.

Let's rewind to April 26 this year, World Penguin Day.

The Pudgy Penguins official account released a commemorative poster, and then MetaMask, Uniswap, Magic Eden, MoonPay, Phantom, Binance.US, Gemini, and many other Web3 institutions joined the alliance, creating a united front and triggering a huge discussion.

This collective behavior seems to no longer be just a Meme frenzy, but more like a "stance expression": Pudgy Penguins has become part of the industry consensus.

Behind this collective appearance is actually the resource network that Pudgy Penguins has built up over the years in the industry.

Pudgy Penguins NFT holders span across major infrastructure projects, ecosystem blockchains, investment institutions, and are spread throughout the nerve endings of Web3. Projects like Dymension, Omni Network, LayerZero, ZkSync, and others have even directly airdropped tokens to Pudgy Penguins' NFT holders.

A Wall Street Veteran's Bell Ringing, a Penguin's Appearance

And this influence has already slowly permeated into traditional finance.

VanEck, the long-established private investment management company founded in 1955, not only changed its Twitter profile picture to Pudgy Penguins back in 2024 but also brought the chubby penguin to the Nasdaq stage on June 23 this year to jointly ring the opening bell.

It was also on this day that Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca wrote on his own Linkedin: "Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto."

When we talk about the word "finance," what comes to mind are institutions, cold data, blue and white tones, no emotions, no visual anchor points. Wall Street's Charging Bull is too far from young people, and a bank's logo is too boring. Even Elon Musk has to rely on dog memes to maintain attention. Pudgy Penguins offers another option, an image that can be understood without professional knowledge and is charming enough to be endearing.

As the Crypto industry gradually moves towards compliance and the mainstream, Web3 is no longer just the club of engineers and VCs; it has to learn to explain itself to the young people on TikTok. An image that can be remembered, willing to buy merchandise, and can be embedded in a product's app launch page may be more crucial to determining the future of this industry than a new protocol.

What Pudgy Penguins want to do is not just pump NFTs or tokens. They have bigger ambitions. What they are vying for is a higher-level positioning — who can become the visual spokesperson for the new generation financial narrative.

Perhaps in the future, Pudgy Penguins will not only be the Face of Crypto but also the Face of Finance.

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