Новая NFT коллекция Pudgy Penguins набирает популярность — Роман Булгаков на vc.ru

Tracy Wang is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.

The Pudgy Penguins non-fungible token (NFT) project is under new leadership after the close of a long-awaited 750 ETH ($2.5 million) sale.

A group led by Pudgy Penguins holder and Los Angeles-based entrepreneur Luca Netz will buy control of the project, along with royalties, from the original four co-founders of the project, according to people involved with the deal. Netz will be the new leader of “The Huddle,” along with his collaborator Cameron Moulène and several other stakeholders.

Control of the project will allow the buyers’ group to launch a token and conduct airdrops to other holders of the NFT series, as well as other rights.

The deal comes as the Pudgy Penguins community ousted their founding team in a contentious Discord vote in January. Since then, holders of the cute flightless digital birds have been waiting for word on the project’s uncertain future.

“This deal [has] taken way longer than I thought,” said Netz, who last spoke with CoinDesk in January when a preliminary deal was struck between Netz and the prior founding team.

On Friday, Pudgy Penguin trading spiked on NFT marketplace OpenSea as deal closing rumors swirled. The floor price of a Pudgy Penguin jumped as high as 2.5 ether (ETH) after trading bounced between 0.7 and 1.4 ETH the past few weeks. As of press time, the cheapest penguin on offer was listed at 2.2 ETH.

Netz planned to officially announce the close of the sale on social media late Saturday, and added that the deal was “100% not an April Fool’s joke” in an interview with CoinDesk on Friday; hence his decision to wait until after April 1 to go public.

“Everything is aligned to make this one of the most prevalent projects of all time,” said Netz, who declined to comment on specific roadmap items, but hinted at at least one retail partnership.

Проект невзаимозаменяемых токенов (NFT) Pudgy Penguins находится под новым руководством после закрытия долгожданной продажи 750 ETH, что составляет по текущему курсу 2,5 миллиона долларов.

По словам людей, причастных к сделке, группа во главе с владельцем Pudgy Penguins и предпринимателем из Лос-Анджелеса Лукой Нетцем купит проект вместе с гонораром у четырех первоначальных соучредителей проекта. Нетц станет новым лидером The Huddle вместе со своим сотрудником Кэмероном Муленом и несколькими другими заинтересованными сторонами.

Контроль над проектом позволит группе покупателей запускать токен и проводить аирдропы (Airdrops) другим держателям серии NFT и другие права.

Сделка была заключена после того, как сообщество Pudgy Penguins вытеснило свою команду основателей в ходе спорного голосования в Discord в январе. С тех пор владельцы симпатичных нелетающих цифровых птиц ждут новостей о неопределенном будущем проекта.

По словам будущего нового хозяина Нетца сделка заняла намного больше времени. Он также отметил, что персонажи коллекции пингвинов стали его первой покупкой NFT. Он говорит, что его привлекла эта коллекция, потому что цифровые пингвины, надевая аксессуары от шляп волшебников до галстуков-бабочек, «излучают радость». Прошлым летом Нетц купил своего первого пингвина примерно за 0,1 ETH.

В пятницу торги Pudgy Penguin на торговой площадке OpenSea выросли на фоне слухов о закрытии сделки. Минимальная цена Pudgy Penguin подскочила до 2,5 эфира (ETH) после того, как в последние несколько недель торги колебались между 0,7 и 1,4 ETH. На момент публикации самый дешевый предлагаемый пингвин стоил 2,2 ETH.

Запущенная в июле Pudgy Penguins стала одной из самых популярных коллекций NFT с объемом торгов более 49 000 эфиров (около 171 миллиона долларов в сегодняшних ценах на эфир) на торговой площадке NFT OpenSea.

Прошлым летом он был показан в колонке New York Times с подробным описанием феномена NFT, и в настоящее время среди его держателей рекламируются такие знаменитости, как участник Матча звезд Национальной баскетбольной ассоциации Стеф Карри и рэпер Тори Ланез.

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The Pudgy Penguins NFT collection which contains 8,888 Ethereum NFTs was sold for 750 ETH or $2.5 million to Netz Capital’s Luca Netz. Along with the deal, Netz will receive all upcoming royalties from the sale on the secondary marketplace.

With the passage of time, the NFT concept is gaining traction among a growing number of people. The name ‘Pudgy Penguins’ will be added to the list of the top NFT collection.

Along with Netz, a group led by Pudgy Penguins holder, his collaborator Cameron Moulene and several stakeholders will also gain control of the project. The acquisition enables them to launch the token, airdrop, and other alluring concepts regarding the future of the project.

“Looking forward to spreading love across the Meta” Netz spoke on the acquisition of the collection.

The move came just after the termination of the controversial one of four founders Cole Villemain through the voting, also known as “ColeThereum”. In January, Netz proposed an offer of 750 ETH to the project founder and asked him to “Make your move ColeThereum.”

ColeThereum confirmed that he and the other three founders no longer hold ownership of the project. “The original team wanted to see our creation go to the next level and we felt Luca had the connections and experience to do that” Cole stated in an interview.

However, the history associated with the Pudgy Penguins collection has always been a controversial topic. In December, a community moderator “ColdPizza” publicly announced his exit from the project after being promoted to the manager position without any agreement.

ColdPizza put an allegation on ColeThereum’s leadership over the Pudgy Penguins collection. He allegedly stated that Cole offered him 1 ETH bribe to keep further information confidential about the project.

“I have never and would never bribe anyone” Cole said in response to the allegation. “We let go of one of our staff members and I offered a 1 Ethereum bonus for being helpful to the project. It was taken out of context and false rumors spread.”

Since the launch in July 2021, the Pudgy Penguins has been continuously rolling up the stairs to place itself as a top NFT collection. At the time of writing, the total traded volume reflected on Opensea is over 50K ETH with 2.98 ETH floor price.

On Friday, the floor price was boosted after 29 Pudgy Penguins NFTs from the collection sold for 68.2852 ETH.

After finding the new founder for the project, rumors say that the project is soon going to be equipped with a $PENGU token following the footsteps of BAYC collection to grow its ecosystem in an exponential manner. However, there is no strong evidence found behind this rumor.

Recently, The top NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club announced the launch of its own native coin ‘ApeCoin’ to enhance and grow the Ape ecosystem for Web 3.0.

Rajpal is enthusiastic about Blockchain and Metaverse. He is tech-savvy and is well-versed in a variety of online games. That, at the very least, explains his interest in technical writing. In contrast to his gamer demeanour, he enjoys reciting some amazing anecdotes from his journal. When he gets stuck due to his vast yet cluttered knowledge, he does gun practice to take «headshots,» in his favorite game, of course!

The Pudgy Penguins collection of 8,888 Ethereum NFTs has been sold for 750 ETH, or roughly $2.5 million, to Netz Capital’s Luca Netz, who’s now leading the project and will receive all future royalties from secondary sales.

NFTs like the Pudgy Penguins are unique blockchain tokens that signify ownership over an asset—in this case, an image of a penguin.

“Looking forward to spreading love across the Meta,” Netz said of the acquisition, which was made public on Saturday.

The sale comes just a few months after the project voted out prominent and controversial founder Cole Villemain, who goes by the name “ColeThereum.”

Netz made public in January his offer of 750 ETH, writing, “Make your move ColeThereum.”

ColeThereum confirmed to Decrypt via Twitter DM that he and the three other founders were no longer involved in the project.

“The original team wanted to see our creation go to the next level and we felt Luca has the connections and experience to do that,” Cole told Decrypt.

While the sale might seem like exciting news for holders, others have raised concerns, claiming Netz wasn’t a well-known figure in the Penguins community before the acquisition.

The Pudgy Penguins collection has a troubled past. On December 11, a former community moderator named ColdPizza—previously known as 0xDarth—publicly exited the project after being promoted to community manager without coming to an agreement on job terms, including compensation.

ColdPizza openly criticized ColeThereum’s leadership in a Twitter Space with 3,000 listeners, alleging that Cole bribed him with 1 ETH ($3,500 at time of publication) to not further disclose any more information about the Pudgy Penguins project.

“I have never and would never bribe anyone,” Cole said in response to the allegation. “We let go of one of our staff members and I offered a 1 Ethereum bonus for being helpful to the project. It was taken out of context and false rumors spread.”

Known Pudgy Penguins whale 9x9x9 previously criticized Cole’s leadership, writing in a lengthy Twitter thread that the project was a “sinking ship” and they weren’t interested in buying the collection for 888 ETH in part because the project’s wallet was empty.

“Cole is the reflection of the lack of trust and transparency between the founders and community of the project. Removing Cole is like eating a painkiller when you have cancer,” they wrote.

On Christmas, some in the Penguins community were disappointed by the reveal of a new companion collection dubbed Pudgy Presents—mysterious eggs that hatched into fishing rods, initially called “rogs,” a term many on Twitter have used as a pun for “rug” and “rugged,” referring to getting “rug pulled” or scammed.

In January, some Pudgy Penguins holders sought a way out of the project because they disagreed with leadership. This led to the creation of the Wrapped Penguins on Metadrop. Per the Metadrop site, it allows “existing Penguins holders to be able to wrap their Penguins into a new collection that doesn’t pay royalties towards the team.”

Some involved with the Penguins project have speculated that Netz’s acquisition may have been a legal exit strategy for the founding team, but are fearful of publicly criticizing the project because of possibly violent retaliation. The original team had promised a Pudgy Penguins game, token, and other products as part of its “roadmap.”

“I tried to warn everyone how much of a scammer Cole was,” one community member told Decrypt on condition of anonymity. “If they sell the company, law enforcement can’t say they didn’t try and follow through on [the] roadmap and promises. I’m thinking it was a purely legal thing. Otherwise they would have just kept it.”

While perhaps the Pudgy Penguins don’t qualify as a rug pull, the Justice Department has started taking action against founders who don’t deliver on promises. Last month, it charged the two founders of the Frosties NFT collection with wire fraud and money laundering after they collected about $1.1 million in profits and then immediately abandoned the project.

When asked by Decrypt for comment on the scam allegations, Cole responded again via Twitter DM: “A scammer would leave people with something worthless, but look at the 3 projects I have been a part of creating … they all are worth many multiples of the mint price and have been very influential in the NFT scene.”

Cole said he’s no longer affiliated with any of those three projects but “supports them as a community member.”

“I consider myself more of a creator than a builder, and I am okay with that,” he wrote, going on to add: “I am confident projects I was a part of creating will still be here in 5 years, and they are far from scams.”

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Tracy Wang is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.

There’s trouble brewing in the huddle.

The beloved NFT project Pudgy Penguins voted out its founders on Thursday after they allegedly failed to deliver on stated goals and drained the treasury of funds. And now at least one splinter group is arguing that the entire project should be decentralized, potentially an industry first.

Launched in July, Pudgy Penguins has become one of the most successful NFT projects, raking in over 45,400 ETH in sales on NFT marketplace OpenSea. (That works out to about $140 million in today’s ether (ETH) prices.) NFT stands for “non-fungible tokens,” a subcategory of cryptocurrencies that represents ownership in a unique asset, from art to real estate.

The collection of 8,888 chubby and flightless Antarctic creatures – donning accessories such as baseball caps and fishing rods – were available to mint last July for 0.03 ETH and sold out in less than 20 minutes.

According to Twitter user and Pudgy Penguins owner @9x9x9eth, Pudgy Penguins co-founder Cole Thereum “promised a game, a token, an educational book on NFTs and more” to the community last September.

“After a half year, they still have not yet set up the team, they are still in the stage of hiring,” 9x9x9 told CoinDesk via Twitter.

(9x9x9 publicly stated he has spent nearly 600 ETH on the collection and holds 242 Pudgy Penguins NFTs and one rare “banana” penguin, purchased for 100 ETH.)

Pudgy Penguins pseudonymous co-founders Cole Thereum and Twitter user @tubbyfat didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment via Twitter direct message.

On Wednesday evening, 9x9x9 published a Twitter thread claiming the Pudgy Penguins founders were looking to abandon the project and offered to sell him its shell for 888 ETH (about $2.8 million), an offer he turned down.

Since the tweets, the floor price of a Pudgy Penguin shot up from about 0.6 ETH ($1,860) on Wednesday evening to 1.7 ETH ($5,270) as of press time.

Now, the project has received buyout offers as high as 750 ETH ($2.3 million) from other prominent individuals in the NFT market, including Mintable co-founder Zach Burks, NFT collector @beaniemax and Netz Capital’s Luca Netz.

Others in the community are more wary of a buyout. NFT hedge fund Starry Night Capital’s @Vince_Van_Dough and eGirl Capital’s @loomdart – other prominent stakeholders in the project – have floated the idea of migrating the community to a new project called Wrapped Penguins.

The Pudgy Penguins founding team receives a small percentage in royalties from each NFT sale, meaning founders of successful projects can continue to line their pockets as long as trading volume persists.

Wrapped Penguins, available as a free mint on NFT platform Metadrop for current Penguin holders, would sever all ties with the original founding team with the new project in the hope of creating a parallel community that would be governed using a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) framework.

A wrapper is a smart contract that takes an asset and issues a parallel asset, allowing the Pudgy Penguins NFT holder to hold an identical “wrapped” penguin. The Wrapped Penguins project has said the holder will be able to “unwrap” their token into the original NFT at any time.

Profile picture projects (PFP) such as Pudgy Penguins, Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks and Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club have driven the recent boom in NFT sales, often run by centralized founding teams who tease new releases for their holders.

Pudgy Penguins “could be the first pure decentralized PFP project ever,” 9x9x9 told CoinDesk.

The battle for control over the Pudgy Penguins project also raises governance questions surrounding NFT communities – or more broadly, what happens when founders fail to deliver on stated goals or the communities themselves experience infighting.

Recent events are reminiscent of battles that have plagued major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, known in the industry as “hard forks.”

“In real life, stakeholders can use the board to dump a poorly performing CEO. This is the first attempt I’ve seen in crypto to do in essence the same thing,” tweeted Jordi Alexander, chief investment officer of Selini Capital. “The community forks everything out without the baggage of the CEO.”

Amid the turmoil, some Pudgy Penguin holders have used the spotlight to spread a popular Pudgy rallying cry: “I am my penguin and my penguin is me.”

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Tracy Wang is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.

Tracy Wang is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.

What happened to the collection of 8,888 rare penguins? Is it still a potential competitor of CryptoPunks and BAYC? Let’s find out!

I Joined a Penguin NFT Club Because Apparently That’s What We Do Now

Is this what the metaverse looks like?

• Updated Aug. 25, 2021

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Earlier this week, I got attacked by penguins.

What had I done to deserve this welcome wagon? Well, a few minutes earlier, I’d acquired my very own Pudgy Penguins, marking me as an owner of one of the internet’s strangest new status symbols.

For months now, the crypto-obsessed have been buzzing about the rise of “community NFTs,” or nonfungible tokens, a kind of digital collectible that combines the get-rich-quick appeal of cryptocurrency with the exclusivity of a country club membership.

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.

Pudgy Penguins, and similar NFT projects, are a bet on this digitized future.

“The way I describe it to my family members and friends is like, people buy Supreme clothes, or they buy a Rolex,” Clayton Patterson, 23, one of the founders of Pudgy Penguins, told me in an interview. “There are all these ways to tell everyone that you’re wealthy. But a lot of those things can actually be faked. And with an NFT, you can’t fake it.”

Mr. Patterson, who goes by the online handle “mrtubby,” is a computer science student at the University of Central Florida. He started Pudgy Penguins with three classmates this summer after seeing other community NFTs take off. They chose penguins as their theme because the birds seemed approachable and friendly, and settled on using an algorithm to generate 8,888 unique penguins with different combinations of clothing, facial expressions and accessories.

“There was huge meme potential in fat-looking penguins, so we decided to roll with that,” Mr. Patterson said.

The first community NFT was the CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 pixelated characters that was sold starting in 2017. They became a luxury status symbol, with single images selling for millions of dollars, and paved the way for other community NFTs, including the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a group of 10,000 cartoon primates that now sell for upward of $45,000 apiece.

Mr. Patterson and his co-founders hope that Pudgy Penguins will end up joining the NFT pantheon. The original collection sold out within 20 minutes, and more than $25 million worth of them have changed hands overall, according to NFT Stats, a website that aggregates data on NFT sales. Early this week, it was still possible to score a penguin for a few thousand dollars, but penguins with rare features, such as different-colored backgrounds or gold medals around their necks, can go for much more. The most expensive was Pudgy Penguin #6873, which sold for $469,000.

I messaged Mr. Patterson on Tuesday, asking if he had any advice for getting my own Pudgy Penguin without breaking the bank. (The New York Times’s expense policy does not, sadly, cover JPEGs of birds.)

“Hold on, I might be able to do something,” he wrote back.

Minutes later, two Pudgy Penguins — #3166 and #5763 — appeared in my cryptocurrency wallet. One was an image of a penguin with a do-rag and sunglasses; the other was wearing a baseball hat with an igloo and what looked like a bomber jacket. They were a gift, Mr. Patterson said, in appreciation of my willingness to learn about the community. (Since I can’t ethically accept gifts, I’ll be sending my Pudgy Penguins back to Mr. Patterson after this column publishes.)

Like any good crypto-clique, Pudgy Penguin owners have developed their own language and customs. Penguins are “pengus.” Owners are “huddlers.” “Tufts” are a rare, valuable type of penguin with no head covering, while “floors” refer to cheaper and more common varieties.

“The people in the community are great,” said Christopher Aumuller, 29, a Pudgy Penguins owner from Queens. “Everyone is pretty much just vibing and sharing penguin memes.”

Tiffany Zhong, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and investor, said part of the penguins’ appeal was that other popular crypto tokens had gotten too expensive.

“The average consumer has been priced out of those projects,” she said. “And so people who are trying to get into this are like, what’s the next big project I can get into?”

Packy McCormick, the author of the Not Boring newsletter, argued in a recent essay that community NFTs were behaving as a kind of social network because they gave people access to social standing and connection, as well as a potentially lucrative investment.

“Powerful things happen when you combine money, status and community,” Mr. McCormick wrote.

It’s true that the people who buy Pudgy Penguins or other community NFTs may end up losing tons of money if the fad passes. But it’s also true that, like the Redditors gleefully pushing up the price of GameStop and AMC, the fans of these projects don’t seem to mind the risk. (In fact, some days, NFT traders and meme-stock speculators seem to be the only people still having fun on the internet.)

And while I personally wouldn’t invest my retirement money in Pudgy Penguins, I find the most common objections to them fairly unconvincing.

Are they a rich person’s plaything, a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere? Sure, but the same could be said of sports cars and designer handbags.

The worst you could say about community NFTs is that they’re encouraging people to overpay for what amount to digital bragging rights, and that suckers will inevitably end up holding the bag when the bubble pops. But I doubt many fans would be dissuaded by the argument.

I told Ms. Zhong, the crypto entrepreneur, that I was still confused by the appeal of Pudgy Penguins, which didn’t seem to do much besides attract attention.

“That’s half the point,” she responded. “No one knows what’s going on, but it’s a lot of fun.”

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New leadership

Launched in July, the Pudgy Penguins has become one of the most popular NFT collections, with over 49,000 ether in trading volume (about $171 million in today’s ether prices) on the NFT marketplace OpenSea.

It was featured in a New York Times column last summer detailing the NFT phenomenon, and currently touts celebrities such as National Basketball Association All-Star Steph Curry and rapper Tory Lanez among its holders.

“Penguins were my first NFT purchase,” Netz told CoinDesk. He says he was drawn to the collection because the digital penguins – donning accessories from wizard hats to bowties – “emit joy.” Netz purchased his first penguin for about 0.1 ETH last summer.

“It’s an interesting emotion to feel when looking at an NFT project,” said Netz. “The collections that evoke emotion are the most powerful.”

“They were so darn cute and everyone loved them,” said Twitter user JoeyMooose of the project’s initial reception. JoeyMooose owns a Pudgy Penguin sporting a green mohawk and coined the collection’s popular rallying cry, “I am my penguin and my penguin is me” during an emotional Pudgy Penguins Twitter Spaces event.

Netz, who built a successful dropshipping business before dabbling in NFTs, says he will head the project’s marketing efforts and turn the Pudgy Penguins into “a brand that’s known both in and outside of the NFT world.”

When asked about a possible Pudgy Penguin toy, Netz responded, “It would be fiscally irresponsible if I didn’t do that.”

Wen $PENGU Token?

Rumors also circulated Friday that the long-awaited Pudgy Penguins token would be announced, further fueling the penguin buying frenzy.

«Speculative fervor is beginning to emerge around NFT floors when there’s the expectation of tokenization, even if it’s often just rumors,» said Twitter user GiganticRebirth, an influential member of the Pudgy Penguins community who holds the rare Ghost Penguin. «With tokenization, it strengthens the thesis that NFTs will serve as yield-bearing assets.»

Such a move would follow in the footsteps of Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club, which launched its ApeCoin (APE) token earlier this month.

Netz denied the rumors but promised a token that “respected the law” would eventually come.

“If [Bored Ape Yacht Club] did it, we will do it,” Netz told CoinDesk on Friday. “But it’s not something I want to tackle now.”

Penguin coup

Pudgy Penguin holders, who collectively refer to themselves as “The Huddle” and “Pengus,” have faced a tumultuous couple of months after their initial slingshot to fame.

With several «accidental» de-listings on OpenSea and declining sales so far this year, the desire for competent leadership has been long awaited.

According to multiple sources, the original Pudgy Penguins founding team made lofty promises to the community, including launching a children’s book, a token and a metaverse game centered around the penguin images. Ultimately, none of the projects came to fruition.

Meanwhile, other profile picture projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cool Cats have seen their prices surge last fall, leaving many holders of the Pudgy Penguins NFTs disappointed.

Pudgy Penguins co-founder Cole Thereum did not respond to repeated requests for comment via Twitter message.

Tensions came to a head on Christmas Day, when a hotly anticipated airdrop revealed NFTs of fishingrods, which were initially misspelled as “rogs.”

“That was the rod that broke the camel’s back,” said Twitter user ActuallyAgents, a Pudgy Penguins community manager, who added that many penguin holders anticipated a game at the time of the reveal. “Imagine if you were a kid waking up on Christmas and your grandma got you a PlayStation2 game, but you didn’t own a PlayStation2.”

In January, the pseudonymous Twitter user 9x9x9 (and holder of the rare Banana Penguin) dropped a thread alleging the Pudgy Penguin founders drained the project’s treasury of funds and offered to sell the project’s shell to him for 888 ETH.

The revelations sparked an uproar in the Pengu community, which culminated in the fateful Discord vote ousting the founders. The floor price of a Pudgy Penguin fell to a low of 0.5 ETH.

Barbarians at the igloo

The vote marked the project’s subsequent descent into chaos, as competing bids, a white knight offer and a grassroots effort to fork the community all played out on social media.

A bidding war broke out over the project in early January, with Luca Netz offering 750 ETH to purchase the penguins. Other public competing offers came from Mintable founder Zach Burks and NFT influencer BeanieMaxi.

The pseudonymous trader GiganticRebirth offered a matching 750 ETH to Thereum and the founders to “wait for a more suitable buyer,” a suggestion that went unheeded.

Another pseudonymous trader, Twitter user Vincent Van Dough, who heads up the Three Arrows Capital offshoot Starry Night Capital, announced he would be “wrapping” his 50+ penguins in an effort to cut off royalty payments to the original founders and jumpstart the formation of a community-owned decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

“Wrapping” refers to a smart contract that takes an asset and issues a parallel asset. Wrapping, the thinking goes, would allow a penguin-holder to maintain the aesthetics of their NFT but sever relations with the original Pudgy Penguins ERC-721 contract. Wrapped penguins can also be converted back to the original at any time.

“We saw this as a perfect opportunity to build a tool that would give the community some leverage,” said Metadrop co-founder Psyopcop during a Discord call with CoinDesk.

Metadrop is an NFT platform that released the code for the wrapper, which has also been used by other NFT communities in turmoil.

Even for penguin holders that chose not to opt into the wrapper, the threat itself turned the smart contract into a game of nuclear politics. “They like having it as an option,” said Metadrop’s loomdart. “Just having it gives the community leverage.”

As of Saturday afternoon, data from Nansen showed a supply of 560 wrapped penguins, or approximately 6% of the total project.

“I think Wrapped Penguins is a really interesting experiment that allows community members to opt out of the status quo,” said Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, who is himself a Pudgy Penguin holder. “You could argue it’s a community fork of the original NFT collection.”

Adding to the drama, Van Dough also challenged Mintable’s Burks to make a “legit offer” on his rare Shark Penguin, saying he would get out of the way and cease the “wrapping” efforts.

“The vibes are just terrible right now,” said JoeyMooose at the time. “It hurts that people are playing this like a game of chess.”

“Too much drama, I can’t keep up,” echoed 9x9x9, who has since shifted his focus onto his OpenDAO project.

Often, holders of rare (and expensive) penguins in the collection exercise outsized influence within the Pudgy community.

The ‘Huddle’ moves forward

Now, the Pudgy Penguins are looking to start a new chapter as the Netz leadership team takes over.

“I’m extremely optimistic and confident in Luca and the team he’s assembled,” Twitter user ActuallyAgents, who will remain in a leadership position under the new regime, told CoinDesk.

“Aside from their great business track record, the philosophy of compassion and inclusivity he wants to bring to the penguins is something the space really needs.”

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Tracy Wang is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.

Tracy Wang is a deputy managing editor at CoinDesk. She owns BTC, ETH, MINA, ENS, various stablecoins, and some NFTs.