Author: BlockBeats
Non-Fungible Tokens have returned to people's focus.
Pudgy Penguins Non-Fungible Token floor price rose nearly 35% in a week, reaching 12.75 ETH, approximately $38,000; $PENGU's price has increased nearly 10 times from its bottom, with a market value exceeding $1.8 billion. Such excitement has been absent from the Non-Fungible Token field for a long time.
More surprisingly, this price rebound was neither due to a popular narrative nor collective shilling by key opinion leaders.
The true starting point was an almost excessively coordinated "avatar change movement".
That Day, Crypto Giants All Changed to Penguin Avatars
On July 12, Coinbase changed its X account avatar to a fat penguin, with the caption "New avatar, who doesn't like it". Immediately after, OpenSea, MoonPay, Polkadot, EigenCloud, OKX, and other crypto projects successively changed to Pudgy Penguins themed avatars, as if they had rehearsed in advance.
After this coordinated avatar change, the Non-Fungible Token floor price rose, $PENGU's trading volume immediately surged, and market expectations for potential collaborations quickly heated up. During the peak of this avatar change, penguin community core member @broskisol said: "I heard Pudgy Penguins will soon officially announce the largest collaboration in Web3 history."
Actually, this is not the first time Pudgy Penguins has had so many well-known project parties stand with it.
Let's rewind to April 26 this year, World Penguin Day.
Pudgy Penguins' official account released a commemorative poster, after which MetaMask, Uniswap, Magic Eden, MoonPay, Phantom, Binance.US, Gemini, and other Web3 institutions joined in, creating a uniform scene that sparked massive discussion.
This collective behavior seems to be more than just a MEME carnival, but more like a "stance expression": Pudgy Penguins has become part of the industry consensus.
Behind this collective appearance is actually the resource network Pudgy Penguins has accumulated over the years in the industry.
Pudgy Penguins Non-Fungible Token holders span across major infrastructure projects, ecosystem public chains, and investment institutions, covering Web3's nerve endings. Projects like Dymension, Omni Network, LayerZero, and ZkSync have even directly issued token airdrops to Pudgy Penguins' Non-Fungible Token holders.
An Old Finance Professional's Bell Ringing, A Penguin's Entrance
This influence has also gradually permeated traditional finance.
VanEck, the old-line private investment management company established in 1955, not only changed its Twitter avatar to Pudgy Penguins in 2024 but also brought the fat penguin to the Nasdaq stage on June 23, ringing that day's opening bell together.
On that day, Pudgy Penguins' CEO Luca wrote on his LinkedIn: "Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto."
When we mention the word "finance", our minds are filled with institutions, cold data, blue and white tones, without emotion or visual anchors. Wall Street's bronze bull is too far from young people, bank logos are too boring, and even Elon Musk has to rely on dog memes to maintain attention. Pudgy Penguins offers another option, an image that doesn't require professional knowledge to understand and is adorable enough.
As the Crypto industry gradually moves towards compliance and mainstream, Web3 is no longer just a club for engineers and venture capitalists. It must learn to explain itself to young people on TikTok. An image that people can remember, want to buy merchandise for, and can be embedded in a product app's launch page might determine the industry's future more than a new protocol.
What Pudgy Penguins wants to do is more than just pumping Non-Fungible Tokens or tokens. They have bigger ambitions, competing for a higher-level positioning - who can become the visual spokesperson for the new generation of financial narrative.
Perhaps in the future, Pudgy Penguins will not only be the Face of Crypto but also the Face of Finance.
