The NFT market is at its coldest moment.

Dune Analytics data shows that the daily trading volume of the leading trading platform OpenSea has dropped to about US$8 million, less than 2% of the peak period data (US$540 million). With the serious slump in transaction volume, the floor prices of leading projects have also continued to fall. BAYC fell below 70 ETH, Moonbirds fell below 13 ETH, Azuki fell below 6 ETH... The continuous price drop even triggered the first NFT lending market. Mass liquidation.

However, under such a deep and bearish scene, there is a project that has stepped out of a completely different curve from other blue chips and completed a counterattack performance that can be called "resurrecting the dead".

Perhaps beyond everyone's expectations, the project that completed this counterattack performance is the veteran NFT Pudgy Penguins (commonly known as "Fat Penguins"). According to OpenSea data,Recently, the floor price of Pudgy Penguins has risen sharply, reaching as high as 3.98 ETH as of the publication, even exceeding the data performance of the "golden period" at the beginning of its birth. In terms of trading volume, Pudgy Penguins has achieved an increase of more than 600+% in the past weekimage description

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Azuki's secondary market performance over the last 90 days.

So how do Pudgy Penguins do it all? To understand this story, we need to start from the past and present of Pudgy Penguins.

Pudgy Penguins was born in July 2021 with an initial sale price of 0.03 ETH. After a not too long cold start period, Pudgy Penguins soon ushered in the first highlight moment of the first half of his life. In August of the same year, an article by New York Times reporter Kevin Roose (note: not Moonbirds founder Kevin Rose) went out of the circleExplosive articleIt has brought huge traffic to Pudgy Penguins, boosting the floor price of the project to break through 3 ETH quickly.

During that "golden period", Pudgy Penguins was almost the most watched newborn IP in the entire NFT market, the project has accumulated a total transaction volume of hundreds of millions of dollars in just over a month. The only rare penguin facing the left (#6873) was sold for a sky-high price of 225 ETH. NBA superstar Stephen Curry also spent 3.5 ETH bought a penguin...

However, the highlight moments that belonged to the first half of Pudgy Penguins' life seem to have come to an abrupt end.For the next six months or so, one drama after another surrounded the Pudgy Penguins.

In December 2021, the "penguin eggs" that had been in the works for several months were unpacked, but what came out of the eggs were a bunch of almost unrecognizable fishing rods, which greatly disappointed the community.

In January 2022, community member 9x9x9 broke the news that the Pudgy Penguins team had swept away all the ETH raised and was hoping to sell the project. This event directly shook the consensus foundation of the entire community.

In March 2022, OpenSea removed Pudgy Penguins for a short period of time. Although it was later proved that the incident was only caused by a technical failure, it further aggravated the panic in the community.

……

With the continuous emergence of various FUD news, the consensus of the Pudgy Penguins community has gradually been worn away, which eventually led to the gradual decline of the project.

Things turned around in April.That month, Los Angeles entrepreneur Luca Netz officially took over Pudgy Penguins at a price of 750 ETH, and announced that he would build a new team and a new roadmap for the project.In the same month, the new team represented by Luca Netz announced a number of new actions around Pudgy Penguins, including designing a new logo for the project, building a new Metaverse project, etc...

Who is Luca Netz? Although he is not well-known in the NFT field, he is an entrepreneur with quite a successful track record in the e-commerce field. The venture capital firm he founded, Netz Capital, has had many successful projects in DTC brands, SaaS and other fields. Investment Case. in other words,Luca Netz has a lot of experience on how to make a good brand.

Over the next few months,In a corner that the market didn't pay attention to, Luca Netz led Pudgy Penguins to deliver multiple results at an amazing speed.According to DoubleQ, founder of Double Studioto sort out, including:

1. Pudgy Media, an information center that aggregates all the dynamics about the Pudgy Penguins ecology.

2. New social media growth plan, with the help of content games, Pudgy Penguins has accumulated more than 112,000 followers on Instagram.

3. Had a themed party in Miami with famous rapper Tory Lanez.

4. Listen to the community and design Pudgy Toys, a physical toy.

5. Airdrop soul-bound tokens truePengu & penguPins for loyal holders, giving these holders more unique identity authentication.

6. Launch a platform that only serves the Pudgy Penguins ecological projectaggregate trading market。

7. Launched a Pudgy Penguins themedSurrounding physical shopping malls。 

8. Made a lot of dynamic meme pictures about Pudgy Penguins.

……

Although from the perspective of specific events, the things done by the new team led by Luca Netz are not too difficult, and there is no special groundbreaking, but it has to be admitted that its execution efficiency is quite high. These continuous actions are seen by people who follow Pudgy Penguins, once or twice may not leave anything, but as various dynamics continue to refresh the screen, the impression will gradually change—” The new team doesn’t seem to be the same as before?”—and this happens to be the basis for the consensus to coalesce again.

Of course, that alone doesn't seem to adequately explain Pudgy Penguins' return from the dead.

Regarding the story of this counterattack, I actually prefer that this is just an isolated case in my heart, because Pudgy Penguins does have a different foundation from ordinary projects. It used to be the "prettiest pup" in the spotlight, even in the darkest years, the floor price of Pudgy Penguins has been hovering around 1 ETH, which means that a group of the most loyal diamond hands still believe in the project In the future, it is they who are "continuing the life" of this once-dying project, giving the project a chance to rejuvenate again. This may be one of the logics behind Luca Netz's initial interest in Pudgy Penguins.

But taking a step back, even if the story of Pudgy Penguins is not very replicable, its success is still welcome (without any derogatory meaning) for the NFT market in deep bearishness. At least this story allows us to witness A real "project side is doing things".