It looks like apes are out, and penguins are in.
Bored Apes Yacht Club, the collection of 10,000 cartoon ape NFTs that became wildly popular in the months after their April 2021 creation, has seen its trading interest languish in recent months. Pudgy Penguins, which were first minted around the same time as Bored Apes, continue to roll.
This trend shows itself in the convergence of the two projects’ floor prices. A collection’s floor price is the lowest price for which a collector could acquire a piece in the collection on secondary markets. As of Monday morning, Bored Ape’s floor price in dollar terms was $57,469, while Pudgy Penguins’ was $51,730, according to data from NFT Price Floor.
Read more: ApeFest marred by reports of eye and skin injuries
What some have dubbed a potential “flappening” is being enabled in part by greater trading interest in Pudgy Penguins. The project has seen over 2,000 sales in the past month, compared to 886 for Bored Apes, per NFT Price Floor.
Data from the pseudonymous researcher NFTstats.eth on X showed that a year and a half ago, the Bored Apes floor price was roughly 100 times that of Pudgy Penguins.
In the time between, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz has worked to carve a distinct lane for Pudgies as a more expansive intellectual propoerty brand. Netz raised a $9 million seed round on this vision in May 2023.
“Luca Netz is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in marketing and e-commerce. He has a clear vision for Pudgy [Penguins]: to transform it into a highly successful intellectual property brand,” Nicolás Lallement, co-founder of NFT Price Floor, told Blockworks. “He seems to be [successfully] executing his plan so far.”
Pudgy Penguins has released toy versions of its NFTs which started selling in Walmart stores in September 2023.
Read more: Pudgy Penguins waddle their way into 2,000 Walmart locations
More recently, Pudgy Penguins teased the open-world game Pudgy World, currently slated for a Q1 2024 release. The game will use Pudgy’s NFT intellectual property and apparently will be compatible with the Apple Vision Pro.
Bored Ape Yacht Club, meanwhile, is owned by Yuga Labs, which saw a hitch in one of its major initiatives last week.
Yuga has recently been developing a metaverse named Otherside. Last week, an Otherside-developed game called Legends of the Mara announced that users could claim collectibles earned during gameplay. Users rushed to mint the NFTs on Ethereum, but elevated gas costs meant that some ended up paying large amounts of gas for the free collectible.
Yuga’s Chief Gaming Officer Spencer Tucker said the studio would give all affected users a different free collectible to make up for the high gas cost, but the game’s community members complained doing so would dilute the value of the initial NFT run.
A few hours later, Yuga reversed course to simply refund the gas fees. “Thanks for calling us on our shit and bearing with us,” Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano said.
Development teams aside, there may be a more abstract force contributing to Bored Ape’s fall and Pudgy Penguins’ rise: coolness.
“Yuga needs to make Apes globally cool again like they were just a short time ago. Get @BoredApeYC in the [mainstream media] headlines again!,” one user wrote on X.
