the Way of Pudgy Penguins_s Rebirth

[TL;DR]

Pudgy Penguins is an OG NFT project released on July 22, 2021, with a total of 8,888, which belongs to the highly anticipated PFP (personal avatar) blue chip NFT in the early days.

In January 2022, community members 9x9x9 disclosed that the Pudgy Penguins team wanted to sell the project, which directly shook the consensus foundation of the whole community.

In April 2022, Luca Netz, a Los Angeles entrepreneur, officially took over Pudgy Penguins at a price of 750 ETH.

The success of Pudgy Penguins also tells us that the project leader is a key factor in the success of a project.




What Is Pudgy Penguins？

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Pudgy Penguins is an OG NFT project released on July 22, 2021, with a total of 8,888, which belongs to the highly anticipated PFP (personal avatar) blue chip NFT in the early days. Each penguin is unique. The initial minted price was 0.03 ETH, and now the floor price is 3 ETH.

Each NFT avatar depicts a cartoon penguin with a different image. The aesthetic combination of Pudgy Penguins is randomly generated from more than 150 hand-painted features, and some penguins wear hats or glasses with Mohawk hair, while some wear a T-shirt or a scarf. You may also see some penguins with devil's horns or a fish lying on their heads.

For example, 357 Pudgy Penguins have headbands, but only 58 have crowns. There are 5 Pudgy Penguins NFTs that are the rarest, including Pudgy Penguins in banana, shark, pineapple and ghost clothes. One of them even goes in the opposite direction to all other penguins.

But like those suits, they sell like hot delicious cakes. Pudgy Penguins sold out soon after the initial sale. They were all minted approximately three weeks after the release. There was also phenomenal exposure growth on Twitter.


Pudgy Penguins was founded by four students from the computer science department of the University of Florida. The reason why they chose penguins as their project’s theme is that they thought that people had a high acceptance of penguins. As long as Penguin NFTs are traded, the creative team can get royalties.

Mrtubby, one of the founders, whose real name is Clayton Patterson, decided to create NFT works with three other students after seeing the rise of other NFTs, and finally established the Pudgy Penguins project.

Mrtubby believes: "there are many ways to tell people that you are rich, but actually many things can be forged. With NFT, you can't forge it."


Downturn After Highlight

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In August 2021, a trending article by Kevin Roose (Note: not Kevin Rose, founder of Moonbirds), a reporter of the New York Times, brought huge traffic to Pudgy Penguins and helped the floor price of the project break through 3 ETH quickly.

In that "golden age", Pudgy Penguins was almost the most concerned new IP in the entire NFT market. The project accumulated a total trading volume of hundreds of millions of dollars in just a month. Among them, the only rare penguin facing the left (# 6873) sold for a sky-high price of 225 ETH. Later, NBA superstar Stephen Curry, who is keen on Web3, also spent 3.5 ETH to get a Pudgy Penguin.


However, the highlight moments belonging to Pudgy Penguins in the first half of their lives seemed to have come to an abrupt end. In the following six months or so, what revolved around Pudgy Penguins was one farce after another.

The original founding team of Pudgy Penguins made lofty commitments to the community, including the launch of children's books, tokens and a metaverse game centered on penguin images. However, in the end, none of the projects achieved results.

In December 2021, the "penguin egg" that had been brewing for several months was opened. As a result, a pile of fishing rods with almost no recognition were opened from the egg, which greatly disappointed the community.

In January 2022, community members 9x9x9 disclosed that the Pudgy Penguins team had taken all the ETH raised and was hoping to sell the project. This incident directly shook the consensus foundation of the whole community.

In March 2022, OpenSea removed Pudgy Penguins for a short time. Although it was later proved that the incident was only caused by a technical failure, it further aggravated the panic in the community.

With the endless emergence of various FUD messages, the consensus of the Pudgy Penguins community was gradually eroded, which eventually led to the gradual decline of the project. This ushered to the decisive Discord vote to oust the founder. The floor price of Pudgy Penguins fell to the low of 0.5 ETH.

Since then, due to the lack of capacity and poor execution of the former founding team, as well as the discord and mutual attacks between the team and the major project owners, Pudgy Penguins did not continue to go high after the initial popularity, and the price continued to go low, slowly losing its popularity and concern.




Towards Rebirth

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After a long period of downturn, the turning point of Pudgy Penguins occurred in April 2022. That month, Luca Netz, a Los Angeles entrepreneur, officially took over Pudgy Penguins at a price of 750 ETH and announced that she would build a new team and a new roadmap for the project. Meanwhile, the new team represented by Luca Netz announced a number of new actions around Pudgy Penguins, including hiring a new COO, applying for the blue label of Twitter and OpenSea, and launching the Ins official account.

Who is Luca Netz? Although he is not very famous in the field of NFT, he is an entrepreneur with a quite successful resume in the field of e-commerce. "Struggling for greatness" is Luca Netz's motto. The venture capital organization Netz Capital he founded has many successful investment cases in the fields of DTC brand and SaaS. In short, Luca's blessing in human resources, operational experience, knowledge reserves and other aspects is very eye-catching. In other words, Luca Netz is very experienced and knows how to build a brand.

In the next few months, Luca Netz led Pudgy Penguins to deliver many results at an amazing speed in a corner that the market did not keep an eye on. According to DoubleQ, the founder of Double Studio, it includes:

1. Pudgy Media, an information center that aggregates all the updates of the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem.

2. According to the new social media growth plan, with the help of content games, Pudgy Penguins has accumulated more than 117,000 followers on Instagram.

3. A themed party was held in Miami with famous rapper Tory Lanez.

4. Listen to the community's opinions and design the physical toy Pudgy Toys.

5. Airdrop the soul binding token truePengu & penguPins to loyal holders, giving them more unique identity authentication.

6. Launched an aggregate trading market that only serves the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem project.

7. Launched a peripheral physical mall with the theme of Pudgy Penguins.

8. Made many Gif meme pictures about Pudgy Penguins.

Although in terms of specific events, the new team led by Luca Netz doesn’t have any trouble doing these things, nor is there any special pioneering work, we have to admit that its execution efficiency is quite high.

These continuous actions are seen by people who follow the updates of Pudgy Penguins, and one or two actions may not impress people, but with the continuous various updates popping up on the screen, the change in impression will gradually occur - "the new team seems to be different from the past?"—— And this is exactly the basis for consensus to converge again.



Cause of Going Viral

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The core motivation of the new team's acquisition of Pudgy Penguins is for "reputation" rather than "profit". Several core members are young and rich. They very much recognize the direction of NFT and hope to achieve something in the field of NFT and "leave a name in history" in the field of Web 3.

Since the acquisition of the project in April 2022, Luca's team has mainly done the following to make Pudgy Penguins go viral again:
Metaverse: establish Pudgy Media as the hub and core of Pudgyverse;

Community: improve the project's exposure in social media, Luca's team has always maintained a high degree of activity in social media, actively participated in various NFT sps, and has a high degree of popularity. The team has also established a Pudgy Penguins offline yacht party in Miami;

Accessories: produce cute community exclusive Pudgy Penguins toys and sell Pudgy Penguins exclusive peripheral clothing;
Soul binding: release soul bound tokens;

Secondary market: establish a secondary trading market exclusively for Pudgy Penguins;

This is very much like taking the BAYC brand route. Based on the brand of Pudgy Penguins, the new team is actually completing a process from 1 to 100. This process is highly matched with the team's resources. As long as the market environment allows, Pudgy Penguins still has a good chance to further improve the brand.

The focus of the team is to expand into the Web2 world. From the perspective of the team's staffing, the team has rich online and offline retail experience and a large number of fashion resources. There are also people who specialize in the development of IP licensing. In addition to the team's previous e-commerce experience, it is still very possible to really expand the IP influence of Pudgy Penguins.

The team is very young, and several core personnel started to work or start businesses at the age of 16. They dare to break new ground and embrace new things, as can be seen from the airdrop of SBF, so the probability that the team will keep pioneering things in the future is very high.

Pudgy Penguins is still undervalued at present, and there may be room for growth in the future.


Conclusion

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Pudgy Penguins, as a head NFT blue chip who has experienced highlights and bad times, used to be the "fashion darling" in the spotlight. Even in the darkest years, there was no collapse. The floor price has been stable at approximately 1 ETH, which means that a group of the most loyal HODLers still believe in the future of Pudgy Penguins. It is they who are "renewing the life" of this once moribund project and giving the project a chance to be reborn. This may also be the logic behind Luca Netz's initial interest in Pudgy Penguins.

The success of Pudgy Penguins also tells us that the project leader is a key factor in the success of a project. He/she must have strong execution and project planning ability, and always have high-quality interaction with the community to maintain enthusiasm. When the leader is very clear about what he wants to do, a positive and harmonious community will help him to succeed.

Nowadays, as the leader of Pudgy Penguins, Luca Netz can see that Luca is always implementing her motto - "striving for greatness", and this may be the true meaning of "the project team stands on solid ground to do things".



Author: Gate.io Observer: Byron B. Translator: Joy Z.
* This article represents only the views of the observers and does not constitute any investment suggestions.
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