PENGU Price Falls as Pudgy Penguins Burn Over $150 Million in Solana Tokens

Pudgy Penguins ended its PENGU token claim on Solana on Wednesday, and burned (or effectively destroyed) all remaining unclaimed tokens—about 13.69% of the total supply, valued at more than $150 million at the time of burning. 

The team initially intended to allow claims until March 9, but later changed the date, giving users just five more days to claim their PENGU. 

The expedited claim was put in place because a majority of Pudgy Penguins NFT owners had already claimed, according to project leader Luca Netz. 

“Makes no sense to keep it open if the data says that the only people claiming today are bots who are running scripts for the 8 million eligible wallets,” Netz posted on X (formerly Twitter) on January 30. 

After the announcement, only about 10% of the remaining airdrop supply was claimed, leaving the Penguins with more than 12 billion PENGU tokens to burn when the claim closed at 9am ET Wednesday. 

Soon thereafter, an address labeled as “Pudgy Penguins Airdrop” by Solana block explorer Solscan transferred the remaining unclaimed PENGU to “1nc1nerator,” the Solana burn address, effectively removing the tokens from the supply.

Despite the supply reduction—a move that often can boost a token’s price due to scarcity considerations—the PENGU price is down almost 8% in the last 24 hours to $0.0117, and remains below the price at the time of the burn. 

The token, which is the “culture coin” of the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem, has fallen outside the top 100 tokens by market cap according to CoinGecko. 

Last week, Pudgy Penguins parent company Igloo Inc. announced it was working on “bringing new inflows” to PENGU and Pudgy Penguins NFTs by trying to boost institutional interest. The Ethereum NFT collection is down 11% on the week to a floor price of $29,860 according to NFT Price Floor. 

Edited by Andrew Hayward