Behind the $PENGU Surge: Can the Little Penguin Become the Face of Finance?

NFT has returned to people’s attention.

The floor price of Pudgy Penguins NFT has risen nearly 35% in a week, reaching 12.75 ETH, approximately $38,000; the price of $PENGU has increased nearly 10 times from the 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 is even more surprising is that this price rebound is neither due to a hot narrative nor a collective call from KOLs.

The real starting point is a somewhat overly tacit “avatar change movement.”

On that day, all the big crypto companies changed to penguin avatars.

On July 12, Coinbase changed its X account profile picture to a chubby penguin, captioned “New profile picture, who doesn’t like it.” Soon after, multiple crypto projects including OpenSea, MoonPay, Polkadot, EigenCloud, and OKX also switched to Pudgy Penguins themed profile pictures, as if they had rehearsed it in advance.

A series of avatar changes led to a rise in the floor price of NFTs, and the trading volume of $PENGU immediately experienced a big pump, as market expectations for potential collaborations rapidly heated up. Amidst this wave of avatar changes, core members of the Penguin community.@broskisolIt was said: “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 project parties in the industry supporting it.

Back to April 26 this year, World Penguin Day.

The official account of Pudgy Penguins released a commemorative poster, and subsequently, a number of Web3 organizations including MetaMask, Uniswap, Magic Eden, MoonPay, Phantom, Binance.US, and Gemini joined in, creating a unified scene that sparked huge discussions.

This collective behavior no longer seems to be just a pure Meme celebration; it is more like a “statement of position”: Pudgy Penguins have become a part of the industry consensus.

Behind this collective appearance is actually the resource network accumulated by Pudgy Penguins over the years of deep cultivation in the industry.

Holders of Pudgy Penguins NFTs span major infrastructure projects, public chains, and investment institutions, reaching the nerve endings of Web3. Projects like Dymension, Omni Network, LayerZero, and ZkSync have even directly distributed token airdrops to Pudgy Penguins’ NFT holders.

A bell ringing by an old financier, the appearance of a penguin.

And this influence has slowly permeated into traditional finance.

VanEck, the 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 Fat Penguins to the Nasdaq stage on June 23 this year to ring the opening bell.

It was also on this day that Luca, the CEO of Pudgy Penguins, wrote on his LinkedIn: “Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto.”

When we talk about the term “finance”, what comes to mind are institutions, cold data, and blue-white tones, devoid of emotion and visual anchors. Wall Street’s bronze bull feels too distant for young people, and bank logos are too boring; even Elon Musk has to rely on his Shiba Inu to maintain attention. Pudgy Penguins offer another option, an image that can be understood without professional knowledge and is charming enough to appeal to people.

As the Crypto industry gradually moves towards compliance and mainstream, Web3 is no longer just a club for engineers and VCs; it must learn to explain itself to young people on TikTok. An image that is memorable, encourages people to buy merchandise, and can be embedded in product app launch pages may have more influence on determining the future of this industry than a new protocol.

Pudgy Penguins aim to do more than just pump NFTs or tokens. They have greater ambitions; they are competing for a higher-level positioning—who can become the visual spokesperson of the new generation of financial narratives.

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

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