Pudgy Penguins bucked the trend and continued to reach new highs. These reasons may be the "driving force" behind it.

Behind the soaring price of Pudgy Penguins, IP creation, game expectations, community building and token airdrops are the main driving forces.

Written by Nancy, PANews

Amidst the general decline of many Ethereum blue-chip NFTs, Pudgy Penguins has bucked the trend and continued to hit record highs in recent days. Data from NFT trading platform Blur shows that as of January 18, the floor price of Pudgy Penguins hit 16.85 ETH, an increase of 53.1% in the past seven days, and the trading volume in the past seven days exceeded 8,405 ETH. Behind the skyrocketing price of Pudgy Penguins, IP creation, game expectations, community building, and token airdrops are the main driving forces.

Enhance IP business value

For NFT projects, IP construction is one of the effective operational means to expand brand commercial value. Luca Netz, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, has also said that relying on unstable royalty income and continuous airdrops is difficult to be viable in the bear market for the long term, and the company/community needs to be built on things beyond NFT. At the same time, he believes that the large-scale popularity of NFT comes from users’ love for IP, and IP is also a good way to provide practicality to holders.

To this end, Pudgy Penguins began to enhance its influence and monetization capabilities through IP derivatives. On the one hand, Pudgy Penguins announced the launch of IP derivative toy product Pudgy Toys in May last year. This is the first mass-market product authorized by the community. Each toy comes with a unique birth certificate, allowing users to scan the QR code to Pudgy World, an online virtual world based on the zkSync Era blockchain, declares the unique characteristics of its digital “Forever Pudgy” character. The toy was launched on Amazon and Walmart stores and achieved good sales, once reaching the top of the list. This also successfully made Pudgy Penguins famous in the mainstream world. On the other hand, Pudgy Penguins also launched the clothing brand Igloo last year, with products covering T-shirts, hoodies, sweatpants and hats are available, with prices ranging from $20 to $700.

In addition, Pudgy Penguins expands its IP reputation outside the circle by cooperating with major mainstream brands. For example, Pudgy Penguins has reached an IP cooperation with the famous Hong Kong comic book “Old Master”; Pudgy Penguins has launched an exclusive “Celebrity Gift Box” in Walmart; it has cooperated with the high-end biscuit brand Last Crumb to release a limited edition Pudgy Biscuit Gift Box; and it has cooperated with the global brand expansion and licensing company Retail Monster Reaching cooperation, the latter has agency experience with big brands such as Disney, DreamWorks and Hasbro; Hollywood agency WME became its official agency; Pudgy Penguins cooperated with Sotheby’s to launch soul-binding tokens, etc.

Enrich brand narrative

Now that the PFP NFT narrative has become cold, more and more projects are beginning to expand application scenarios. Luca Netz revealed in November last year that Pudgy Penguins will launch two different arcade games in 2024, one of which is a crane.

Soon after, Pudgy Penguins announced plans to launch the online gaming platform Pudgy World on zkSync. The Alpha version will be released before April 2024. The game is an interactive digital world available to Pudgy Penguin NFT holders. It is an NFT Narrative-driven and open-ended play options available to owners, toy owners, and other users. At that time, Pudgy World Alpha will also introduce new characters Pudgy and Peaches.

Deepen community emotional connections

Luca Netz once pointed out that the construction of the global collectibles market is not based on liquidity or instantaneous dopamine secretion, but on emotional connections. If a sufficiently attractive emotional connection can be established, the best value-added mechanism can be created.

In terms of community empowerment, in the past few months, Pudgy Penguins launched the IP licensing market Overpass to solve the original complex and cumbersome IP licensing process of NFT, allowing companies to obtain intellectual property licenses directly from holders for use in their products and tools. Provide holders with scalable methods of monetization. In addition, Pudgy Penguins also launches MVP soul-bound tokens to recognize the most outstanding members of the community. The community will nominate their favorite Pudgy Penguins every month and decide who will ultimately win the title of “MVP”, MVP and weekly selected community participation Participants will receive an airdrop of soul-bound tokens.

Shovel attribute blessing

The “Golden Shovel” attribute empowerment may be one of the reasons why the price of Pudgy Penguins continues to rise. At the beginning of this month, the modular blockchain Dymension released the genesis airdrop rules stating that NFT holders such as Pudgy Penguins were included in the airdrop list. Although Pudgy Penguins has revealed that the project will not have tokens in the short term before the market value provides sufficient rationality and guarantee, the expected token airdrops of other projects have also attracted users to buy to a certain extent.

“Who would say no to a cute “fat penguin”?” After taking over Pudgy Penguins, Luca Netz determined to build it into the first popular brand in the Web3 market. The business operation concept and emphasis on community building have become the key to Pudgy Penguins’ success. “The trump card”.