Giants all changed their profile pictures to “penguins”. What kind of encrypted consensus network is behind this?

The NFT project Pudgy Penguins has regained attention as its floor price surged by 35% in a week to 12.75 ETH (~$38,000), while its token $PENGU skyrocketed 10x from its bottom, reaching a market cap of over $1.8 billion.
The rally was triggered by a coordinated "profile picture movement" where major crypto firms like Coinbase, OpenSea, OKX, and Polkadot changed their social media avatars to Pudgy Penguins, sparking speculation about a major Web3 partnership.
This isn't the first show of industry-wide support; earlier in April, MetaMask, Uniswap, Binance.US, and others collaborated with Pudgy Penguins for World Penguin Day.
The project's influence extends beyond crypto: VanEck, a traditional finance giant, featured Pudgy Penguins at Nasdaq's opening bell, with its CEO declaring it "the face of crypto."
Pudgy Penguins aims to become the visual symbol of next-gen finance, bridging Web3 and mainstream adoption through a universally appealing mascot, challenging traditional finance's impersonal imagery.
The movement reflects deeper industry consensus, as Pudgy Penguins holders span major Web3 projects, with some even airdropping tokens to them.
The project's ambition goes beyond NFT/token prices—it seeks to redefine financial branding for younger generations, leveraging memetic appeal and cultural relevance.

NFT has returned to people's attention.

The floor price of Pudgy Penguins NFT rose by nearly 35% in a week, reaching 12.75 ETH, equivalent to about 38,000 US dollars; the price of $PENGU rose nearly 10 times from the bottom, with a market value of over 1.8 billion US dollars. This kind of excitement has not appeared in the NFT field for a long time.

What is even more surprising is that this price rebound was neither due to a popular narrative nor a collective call from KOLs.

The real starting point was a "profile picture changing movement" that was a bit too tacit.

That day, all the major Crypto companies changed their avatars to penguins.

On July 12, Coinbase changed its X account profile picture to a fat penguin, with the caption "Who doesn't like a new profile picture?" Soon after, several crypto projects such as OpenSea, MoonPay, Polkadot, EigenCloud, and OKX successively changed their profile pictures to Pudgy Penguins, as if they had rehearsed in advance.

After a series of avatar-changing moves, the NFT floor price rose, the trading volume of $PENGU also skyrocketed, and the market's expectations for possible cooperation quickly heated up. At the climax of this wave of avatar-changing, @broskisol, a core member of the Penguin community, said: "I heard that Pudgy Penguins will soon officially announce the largest cooperation in the history of Web3."

In fact, this is not the first time that Pudgy Penguins has had so many well-known project parties in the industry support it.

Let’s go back to April 26 this year, World Penguin Day.

The official Pudgy Penguins account released a commemorative poster. Subsequently, a number of Web3 institutions including MetaMask, Uniswap, Magic Eden, MoonPay, Phantom, Binance.US, Gemini, etc. joined the collaboration. The scene was uniform and triggered huge discussion.

This collective behavior seems to no longer be a simple meme carnival, but more like an "expression of position": Pudgy Penguins has become part of the industry consensus.

Behind this collective appearance is actually the resource network that Pudgy Penguins has accumulated over many years of deep cultivation in the industry.

Pudgy Penguins NFT holders span major infrastructure projects, ecological public chains, investment institutions, and are all over the nerve endings of Web3. Dymension, Omni Network, LayerZero, ZkSync, etc. even directly issued token airdrops to Pudgy Penguins NFT Holders.

An old financier rings the bell, a penguin appears

And this influence has already gradually penetrated into traditional finance.

VanEck, a well-established private investment management company founded in 1955, not only changed its Twitter profile to Pudgy Penguins as early as 2024, but also brought the fat penguins to the Nasdaq stage on June 23 this year to ring the opening bell of that day.

It was also on this day that Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca wrote on his Linkedin: “Pudgy Penguins is the face of crypto.”

When we talk about the word "finance", all that comes to mind are institutions, cold data, blue and white tones, no emotions, and no visual anchors. Wall Street's bronze bull is too far away from young people, bank logos are too boring, and even Elon Musk has to rely on terriers to maintain attention. Pudgy Penguins provides another option, an image that can be understood without professional knowledge and is lovable enough.

As the Crypto industry gradually moves towards compliance and mainstream, Web3 is no longer just a club for engineers and VCs, it has to learn to explain itself to young people on TikTok. An image that people can remember, buy peripherals for, and embed on the product app startup page may determine the future of this industry more than a new protocol.

What Pudgy Penguins wants to do is not just to pull the price of NFT or tokens. They have a bigger ambition. What they are fighting for is a higher-level positioning - who can become the visual spokesperson of the new generation of financial narrative.

Perhaps in the future, Pudgy Penguins will not only be the face of Crypto, but also the face of Finance.