Behind $PENGU's Surge: The Little Penguin Aims to Become the Face of Finance
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Behind $PENGU's Surge: The Little Penguin Aims to Become the Face of Finance
Pudgy Penguins NFT floor price surges nearly 35% in a week, $PENGU price up almost 10x from its bottom.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: BlockBeats
NFTs are back in the spotlight.
The floor price of Pudgy Penguins NFT surged nearly 35% in a week, reaching 12.75 ETH—approximately $38,000. Meanwhile, the $PENGU token has risen close to 10x from its lows, with a market cap exceeding $1.8 billion. Such excitement hasn't been seen in the NFT space for quite some time.
Even more surprisingly, this rebound wasn’t driven by a viral narrative or coordinated endorsements from KOLs.
The real spark? A suspiciously well-coordinated “profile picture swap” movement.
The Day Crypto Giants All Switched to Penguin Avatars
On July 12, Coinbase changed its X account avatar to a chubby penguin, captioning it: "New profile pic—who doesn't love it?" Shortly after, OpenSea, MoonPay, Polkadot, EigenCloud, OKX, and several other crypto projects followed suit, rolling out Pudgy Penguins-themed avatars as if they had rehearsed together.
As the avatar-swap wave unfolded, the NFT’s floor price climbed, trading volume for $PENGU spiked instantly, and market speculation around an upcoming collaboration quickly heated up. At the peak of this trend, core community member @broskisol teased: "I heard Pudgy Penguins will soon announce the biggest partnership in Web3 history."
This isn’t the first time Pudgy Penguins has rallied so many prominent projects to its side.
Go back to April 26—World Penguin Day.
The official Pudgy Penguins account posted a commemorative graphic, and then MetaMask, Uniswap, Magic Eden, MoonPay, Phantom, Binance.US, Gemini, and other major Web3 institutions joined in unison, creating a strikingly unified campaign that sparked widespread discussion.
This kind of collective action goes beyond meme-driven hype—it feels more like a statement of alignment: Pudgy Penguins has become part of the industry’s shared consciousness.
Behind this mass visibility lies years of relationship-building and network cultivation within the industry by Pudgy Penguins.
Pudgy Penguins NFT holders span across major infrastructure projects, ecosystem blockchains, and investment firms—embedded throughout the nerve endings of Web3. Projects like Dymension, Omni Network, LayerZero, and ZkSync have even directly airdropped tokens to Pudgy Penguins NFT holders.
A Veteran Financier Rings the Bell, A Penguin Takes the Stage
This influence has also begun seeping into traditional finance.
VanEck, the veteran private investment management firm founded in 1955, not only switched its Twitter avatar to a Pudgy Penguin back in 2024 but also brought the chubby penguin to the Nasdaq stage on June 23 this year, jointly ringing the opening bell.
On that very day, Luca, CEO of Pudgy Penguins, wrote on LinkedIn: "Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto."
When we think of “finance,” images of institutions, cold data, and sterile blue-and-white branding come to mind—impersonal, emotionless, lacking visual identity. Wall Street’s bronze bull feels distant to younger generations; bank logos are dull; even Elon Musk relies on doge memes to stay relevant. Pudgy Penguins offers an alternative: a lovable, instantly recognizable figure that requires no technical knowledge to appreciate.
As the crypto industry moves toward regulation and mainstream adoption, Web3 is no longer just a playground for engineers and VCs. It needs to learn how to speak to young people on TikTok. In shaping the future of this industry, an image that people remember, buy merchandise for, and see every time they open an app may matter more than any new protocol.
Pudgy Penguins isn’t just trying to pump an NFT or token. They have bigger ambitions. What they’re really competing for is a higher-order role—who gets to be the visual ambassador of the next-generation financial narrative?
Perhaps one day, Pudgy Penguins won’t just be the Face of Crypto—but the Face of Finance.
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