A heavyweight from the once-hot NFT era is now getting into the cryptocurrency issuance game.

Pudgy Penguins launched three years ago as a set of 8,888 NFTs depicting colorful and comical birds.

Now, the team behind the project tells CoinDesk that they will release a token called PENGU this year on the Solana blockchain.

Nearly a quarter — 23.5% — of the 88 billion PENGU tokens will be reserved for owners of the project’s NFT collections like Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys, Pudgy Rods and more. A further 22.02% will be available to the Solana and Ethereum communities, while 12.32% are set aside to provide liquidity on decentralized exchanges.

“With $PENGU, the millions of Pudgy Penguin fans and the hundreds of millions of people who see and share the Pudgy Penguin every day now get the opportunity to align themselves with the character and become a part of The Huddle,” the team shared in a statement.
Pudgy is among the rare collections that managed to stay culturally relevant in the otherwise dreadful NFT business following the price crash from the 2021-2022 bull market. Many NFTs lacked real utility beyond being a digital brag. It was also difficult to fully realize gains after price bumps — as market liquidity was often inadequate to fill orders.

The pivot comes as fun tokens and memecoins, unlike NFTs, have taken off and flourished in the last two years. Liquidity, relative cheapness, virality and ease-of-use are key reasons why people have flocked to these latest hot asset classes — even though fun tokens and memecoins fundamentally represent the same idea as NFT collections did: belonging to a passionate community.

Official Pudgy Penguins channels have over 3 million followers across Instagram, X, TikTok and YouTube, and videos involving the characters have notched 32 billion views on Giphy.

One of the brand’s TikTok accounts is focused on spreading good vibes under the “Pudgy Kindness” moniker — popularizing it as a feel-good service in the mainstream, outside of crypto circles.

It goes beyond screens too. Parent company Igloo last year introduced Pudgy Toys, a toy line based on the digital art collection, and has since sold more than $10 million in collectible igloos and plushies that are carried at major retailers, including Walmart, Target, Amazon and Walgreens.

Pudgy Penguins is the third-largest NFT collection by market capitalization — $550 million in total — as of Thursday, <a href=”httpss://www.coingecko.com/en/nft” target=”_blank”>data shows</a>, trailing only CryptoPunks and Bored Apes Yacht Club. The collection came to life in 2021, and each penguin is hand-drawn and features various distinct traits such as backgrounds, body, face, head and skin.