With altcoin season 2025 rapidly approaching, PENGU, the tokens of the Pudgy Penguins, appears to be one of the big players in the coming month. The token has skyrocketed 13% in a day, currently trading at $0.040, a 250% price increase since the token’s Dec. 17 debut.
PENGU was launched with a $2.8 billion market cap, but this figure has now fallen down to $2.5 billion according to CoinGecko data. The token is a key focus in the crypto world despite the pullback, and it has pledged ambitious plans for growth and adoption.
PENGU Surge Continues Despite NFT Sales Drop
With the bullish momentum, some large holders cash out. On January 4, 84 million PENGU, or around $3.13 million, were transferred out of Binance by the wallet using the same addresses as wallets associated with Aries, the Chinese experimenter, and Evermoon, a project that activists claim is tied to the Ming 8 hack.
The rally has been tempered by profit-taking, but Pudgy Penguins hasn’t gone out of the headlines, thanks to its innovative marketing efforts. On January 3, the project had successfully reached ‘billions of GIF views, a sold-out Telegram sticker experiment, and viral campaigns on Instagram and TikTok’ in the first days of the new year, according to the community lead, Berko Crypto.
PENGU is currently running on the Solana blockchain, but it will support Ethereum and Abstract, a scaling solution for Ethereum built upon Igloo Inc. Pudgy Penguin NFT holders have received 25.9% of PENGU with a total supply of 88.88 billion tokens via Airdrop Claims.
While the token’s exact use case remains unclear, Bybit analysts believe the token will be part of governance and exclusive ecosystem perks that are accessible only to DPFI holders. Prominent crypto trader Pentoshi hinted at potential future rewards for PENGU holders, stating:
“$PENGU holders to receive Abstract (potentially another six-figure airdrop). You may qualify by earning the Pengu holder and Pengu enjoyer roles in the Pudgy Discord.”
Pudgy Penguins’ NFT sales are getting pummelled, sliding backwards, as PENGU continues to grow. For its part, weekly sales came down a staggering 52 percent to $5.5 million, says CryptoSlam. Transaction rates dropped by 51%, the number of buyers and sellers by 56% and 41%, respectively.
However, it’s a downward trend, which is in contrast to broader NFT market trends. Azuki, on Ethereum’s NFT collection, posted the smallest sales drop at 17.65%, but DMarket’s top collection on Mythos bucked the trend and saw a 10.43% sales increase.
Crypto Punks are still the second-largest NFT collection by market cap at $721M, second only to Pudgy Penguins at $721M per NFT Price Floor.
Challenges in the NFT space have seemingly not stopped Pudgy Penguins from growing its brand through retail partnerships with Walmart and Target, which have been licensing its brand name to incorporate as toys. The project has sold over one million toys to this date, making it a full-blown phenomenon in cultural terms.
With the start of altcoin season comes PENGU as a strong player to lookout for in 2025, owing its roots in community engagement, expansion plans, and mainstream adoption. Whether the rally can be sustained, it’s capturing crypto’s faithful’s attention around the globe.
