Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, Memeland, and BAYC: A Look at Recent NFT Token Trends

The NFT space experienced a boom during the "NFT Summer" of 2021 and peaked in early 2022. However, since then, there has been a significant decline in activity.

The NFT market experienced a boom during the "NFT Summer" of 2021, with activity peaking in early 2022. However, there has been a significant decline in NFT activity since then.

Recently, the token launches of @pudgypenguins and @Azuki have led to a resurgence in NFT popularity.

Here's a closer look at the latest NFT token trends.

Key Points

To better understand the current NFT ecosystem, we will analyze the following projects and their token strategies: Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, BoredApeYC, and Memeland.

Pudgy Penguins has two related tokens: $PENGU (community/meme token) and @Abstract_Eco (L2). In December 2024, $PENGU was launched on Solana, with over 50% of the tokens being distributed to the community via airdrops. The anticipation of the airdrop drove the floor price of Pudgy NFTs to an all-time high of 35 ETH. According to @Dune data, $PENGU currently has 615,000 on-chain holders.

AbstractChain is a consumer-facing zk-rollup L2, formerly known as Frame, which was acquired by @IglooInc. Both the Abstract and Pudgy communities are eagerly awaiting the launch of the Abstract mainnet in Q1 2025, despite the fact that no related tokens have yet been released.

Azuki launched the @animecoin token this month, which resulted in a 2 ETH increase in the NFT floor price. $ANIME is linked to AnimeChain, an L3 chain built on Arbitrum Orbit that focuses on anime. Similar to $PENGU, over 50% of $ANIME will be allocated to the community. Apart from the company and team/advisors portion, the remaining tokens will be fully unlocked upon issuance.

Memeland is a Web3 game studio that has launched several games and NFT series. Memeland launched the $MEME token in April 2023 and used airdrops to cover all Memeland NFT series, including MVP, Captainz, and Potatoz.

A year later, Memeland launched Memenet, an L2 network on Ethereum.

Yugalabs is the company behind the NFT series @BoredApeYC and MAYC. They launched @apecoin in May 2022, making it the first blue-chip NFT token on the market. $APE serves as the governance and utility token within the APE ecosystem.

They also launched ApeChain in September 2024, which is a network that resembles Azuki's AnimeChain and is situated on the Arbitrum Orbit L3 network. ApeChain was released a few months after the token launch, in keeping with $APE's strategy.