Non-Fungible Token has returned to people's view again.
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 not been seen in 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 overly coordinated "avatar changing movement".
That day, Crypto giants all changed to penguin avatars
On July 12th, Coinbase changed its X account avatar to a chubby 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, and $PENGU's trading volume immediately surged, with market expectations for potential collaboration quickly heating up. During the peak of this avatar change, penguin community core member @broskisol said: "I heard Pudgy Penguins will soon officially announce the biggest 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 26th, 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 accumulated by Pudgy Penguins 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, ZkSync have even directly issued token airdrops to Pudgy Penguins' Non-Fungible Token holders.
A veteran financial professional's bell-ringing, a penguin's appearance
This influence has also slowly permeated traditional finance.
VanEck, a veteran private investment management company established in 1955, not only changed its Twitter avatar to Pudgy Penguins in 2024 but also brought the chubby penguin to the Nasdaq stage on June 23rd, ringing that day's opening bell.
On that day, Pudgy Penguins' CEO Luca wrote on his Linkedin: "Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto."
When we mention "finance", we typically think of 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 VCs; 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's app launch page might determine this industry's future more than a new protocol.
What Pudgy Penguins wants to do is not just pump Non-Fungible Tokens or tokens. They have bigger ambitions, competing for a higher-level positioning - who can become the visual spokesperson for the next generation of financial narrative.
Perhaps in the future, Pudgy Penguins will not just be the Face of Crypto, but also the Face of Finance.
