Pudgy Penguins NFTs Surge Above $100K on Solana Airdrop Hype

The Pudgy Penguins floor price broke through $100,000, up more than 20% in the last 24 hours, as excitement and speculation surround the Ethereum $NFT project and its upcoming token airdrop on Solana.

The collection of 8,888 Penguin NFTs broke an all-time high mark last week when it began trading around $62,000. Shortly thereafter, the project’s team announced that an ecosystem token—$PENGU—will be launched on Solana in the near future, rewarding holders of the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem and beyond.

Since that time, Pudgy Penguins has cemented itself as the second most-expensive profile picture (PFP) project, rising by 99% in the last seven days to a current price of over $103,000 worth of ETH—a new all-time high mark—and surpassing the Bored Ape Yacht Club in the process, according to data from $NFT Price Floor.

The floor price commonly refers to the lowest price for an asset listed on an $NFT marketplace. The Pudgy ecosystem of NFTs has also seen a sharp rise, as its companion collections Lil’ Pudgys and Pudgy Rods (aka Rogs) are both up more than 90% in the last seven days.

Both collections are expected to receive a portion of the upcoming $PENGU airdrop, which will provide 25.9% of its total 88.88 billion token supply to the Pudgy Penguin community.

$PENGU is expected to launch some time before the end of 2024, though no official date has been announced.

Nevertheless, pre-market trading has begun on applications like Whales Market, where $PENGU has traded routinely between $0.04-$0.05 on nearly $300,000 in lifetime volume.

While pre-market data is typically volatile and unreliable, Whales Market pre-market trading effectively ballparked the price of Tuesday’s ME token airdrop from $NFT marketplace and Bitcoin decentralized exchange, Magic Eden.

Estimates based on current pre-market trading could place the $PENGU fully diluted valuation, or the price of the token multiplied by the total token supply, at $4.5 billion—a mark that would put the $PENGU token in the same range and FDV of tokens like AAVE or PYTH, both top 100 tokens by market capitalization according to CoinGecko.

Pudgy Penguins was once a near-forgotten $NFT brand, but has blossomed into one of the most recognizable brands in web3 since its acquisition in 2022 by current leader, Luca Netz. The brand has since expanded into physical toys sold at major retailers like Walmart and Target, as well as blockchain-infused video games.

The project’s parent company, Igloo Inc., recently raised more than $11 million to build out Abstract, an Ethereum layer-2 network and consumer-focused blockchain.

Edited by Andrew Hayward