Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) is a new star among meme tokens that has won the hearts of millions of fans

Pudgy Penguins is an example of such a meme token — it managed to take its place among the segment leaders along with Bonk (BONK), Pepe (PEPE), Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Dogecoin (DOGE).

What is Pudgy Penguins?

Pudgy Penguins is a new meme token issued on the Solana blockchain by Igloo Inc. in the second half of December 2024.

The project's history dates back to July 2021, when the Ethereum blockchain-based NFT Pudgy Penguins non-fungible token (ERC-721) collection of 8,888 unique penguin meme images was issued. As of December 2024, Pudgy Penguins is the second largest NFT collection on the market by market capitalization after CryptoPunks, which managed to surpass even the world-famous Bored Ape Yacht Club, as well as Azuki, Doodles, and Mutant Ape Yacht Club.

NFT-collection Pudgy Penguins became so popular that it gained more than 50 billion views on social networks, and toys based on it appeared on the shelves of major stores like Walmart and Target.

Amid the excitement surrounding their NFT collection, the Pudgy Penguins project team decided to issue their own token of the same name only on the Solana blockchain, which, as of December 2024, is the leader in terms of the number of meme tokens issued on it.

The project's founder did not hide his intentions to attract as much attention to his project as possible, stating, "The task of a founder in the field of cryptocurrencies is to achieve maximum excitement."

According to the project's creators, choosing the Solana blockchain allowed the project to "expand its audience and attract a new group of users," as it previously focused exclusively on the Ethereum ecosystem. However, the developers note that they also plan to release the Pudgy Penguins token on the Ethereum blockchain and the Abstract Layer-2 (L2) network.

According to the project's founder, having the token allows millions of fans worldwide to better interact with the Pudgy Penguins brand. News of the meme token's launch led to a sharp rise in the Pudgy Penguins NFT, but after the release of PENGU, the value of the collection also dropped precipitously.

About the Pudgy Penguins token

The PUDGY token appeared on exchanges on launch day, December 17, 2024. On the same day, its capitalization reached $488 million, and the price jumped to its absolute maximum (ATH) at $0.057.

As of the end of December 2024, the price of the Pudgy Penguins token is $0.035, which is almost 49% lower than ATH, with a capitalization of $2.16 billion. By this indicator, the meme token ranks 60th in the overall ranking of cryptocurrencies and among the top five leaders in the memcoin segment, only slightly behind BONK.

This resounding success was probably due to the high popularity of the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection. Before the launch of PENGU, the minimum price for each token reached $100,000. As of the end of December 2024, the minimum price (flor) of NFT Pudgy Penguins is around $70,000.

88.88 billion PENGU tokens have been issued, of which 62.41 billion are circulating in the crypto market. According to the project's official tokenomics, more than 25% of Pudgy Penguins tokens have been reserved for the project's community and about the same amount (24.7%) for community partners.

Pros and cons of Pudgy Penguins

Despite the high popularity of the Pudgy Penguins token, the asset itself does not yet have any practical value and is not used anywhere. Therefore, the value of the PENGU meme token is based solely on the community's interest.

Based on their collection, Pudgy Penguins tokens cannot be used to purchase NFTs or toys in the project's store. The team does not yet know what plans it has to find a use for the PENGU tokens it has released.

However, social interest and presence in the mass media have shown that, more often than not, they have a stronger effect than even the presence of strong technology, such as Celestia (TIA), Starknet (STRK), and LayerZero (ZRO).

Conclusion

Pudgy Penguins was another successful project that showed that it is possible to get through tough times with a focused team effort. Although Pudgy Penguins became one of the most popular projects in the NFT sphere and the memcoin segment, this did not happen immediately. Although Pudgy Penguins became a sensational project initially, its team faced many difficulties caused by the period in the NFT market called the "great blizzard".

Because of this, the collection began to lose popularity rapidly, and many successful NFT projects ridiculed it. However, thanks to the strong support of the community, the project was able to not only survive this period but also become one of the major ones in its segment.

Considering that meme tokens were one of the top trends in 2024 and will probably continue in 2025, Pudgy Penguins still has a high potential for growth in case the crypto market continues its bull run.