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The Penguin NFT Club is a curious collection of 8,888 Non-Fungible Tokens of cute penguins that saw the sale of Pudgy Penguin #6873 for $469,000.
Conceived this summer by “mrtubby” or Mr. Patterson, along with three other computer science classmates at the University of Central Florida, the penguin NFTs follow the Ethereum standard and seem to be appreciated by the crypto community.
Specifically, they are 8,888 unique penguins with different combinations of clothing, facial expressions and accessories. In this regard, Patterson commented as follows:
“There was huge meme potential in fat-looking penguins, so we decided to roll with that”.
And the new idea seems to have found its way to success at a time when the emerging NFT market is literally exploding.
Indeed, according to reports, the original collection sold out in 20 minutes with appreciation reportedly in excess of $25 million.
In the last four days alone, 4 Pudgy Penguins have been sold as follows:
- #6873 at approximately $469,000
- #5678 for approximately $315,000
- #7365 for approximately $217,000
- #1516 for approximately $175,000
Pudgy Penguins and the NFT Community as the basis of the metaverse
This curious collection of Pudgy Penguin and its resounding success reflect the current market trend towards NFT Communities as well.
Unlike NFT ART, which represents a digitized, unique work of art as if it were any physical painting, NFT Communities are instead group projects.
Like the Pudgy Penguins, they are actually released in sets of unique images (i.e. with the possibility to buy and sell them individually) but linked together by a theme. Not only that, by buying a Community NFT you join the project community and gain additional benefits.
Reflecting on this evolution of collectible tokens, it is said that Community NFTs are the basis for the metaverse, an all-encompassing digital world that will eventually have its own forms of identity, community and governance.
Essentially:
“Metaverse enthusiasts believe that our digital identities will eventually become just as meaningful as our offline selves, and that we’ll spend our money accordingly. Instead of putting art on the walls of our homes, they predict, we’ll put NFTs in our virtual Zoom backgrounds. Instead of buying new clothes, we’ll splurge on premium skins for our V.R. avatars”.
This idea was also expressed and shared by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook in an interview last month. And indeed, it is not news that Facebook has been working with virtual and augmented reality for some time.
Focusing on NFTs, however, there are already other projects that aim precisely at representing reality and the concept of the metaverse. Among the many, there is OVRLands, the digital world divided into 300 hexagons of which each OVRLand is an Ethereum NFT.
In early May 2021, OVR auctioned off its Eiffel Tower NFT for 38 ETH, the equivalent of almost $107,000 at the time.