Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I like the memetic category because technically the way that Pengu is structured is very much like a meme coin. But it's more than that. Saying it's a meme coin, I think, is doing it a disservice. It's a culture coin. It's a community coin. It could be one day a gaming coin or an AI coin. But I think in its principle, that's the beauty of meme coins, right? Is they can be a lot of different things while still, you know, remaining a meme. If you understand, you know, Pudgy Penguin's marketing strategy and our roots and our origin stories, it's very much memetic culture.
When we're getting 300 million views a day on GIFs, you know, GIFs are memes, right? I said an interesting thing a year ago, but, you know, the person who controls the GIFs controls the memes and the person who controls the memes controls the world.
Welcome to Bankless, where today we follow the pudgy penguins to the frontier of in real life consumer experiences and the gift layer of the Internet and overall the growth of the pudgy penguin meme across both the real and the virtual worlds. This is David Hoffman, and I'm here to help you become more bankless. Luca Netz is on the podcast today. He is the man behind Pudgy Penguins, which is perhaps crypto's most beloved NFT project.
But today, in January of 2025, Pudgy Penguins is just so much more than an NFT project. It's now also a token. It's now also in real life plushy animals and also a layer two as well. Luke Annette is building an empire all around growing the Pudgy brand and the Pengu meme. He's rewriting the meme game strategy from the ground up. And if it works, then I think he's going to change the game of what it means to launch a meme in crypto.
We had Luca on the podcast almost a year ago in February of 2024, and we're bringing him back on to update us as the Pengu universe continues to grow and evolve to new heights. So let's go ahead and talk to Luca Nets right now. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the METH protocol is home to METH, the fourth largest ETH liquid staking token.
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By becoming a Layer 2, Celo leads the way for other EVM-compatible Layer 1s to follow. Follow Celo on X and witness the great Celo happening, where Celo cuts its inflation in half as it enters its Layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership. Bankless Nation, very excited to introduce you to Luca Netz, the CEO of Igloo Inc., the company behind the iconic Pudgy Penguins brand.
After buying the Pudgy Penguins IP in April of 2022, the NFTs rocketed off the floor of the bear market and became maybe the only NFT brand and ecosystems that actually fulfilled some of the promises made by the NFT movement in 2021. Today, Pudgy Penguins are the number two NFT by market cap, roughly valued at $620 million behind CryptoPunks at $1.3 billion. And not too long ago, the Penguins launched their Pengu token coming in at $1.5 billion today.
in market cap. Luca, welcome back to Bankless. Hey, David. Thanks for having me. Luca, my friend Peter Pan wrote this tweet thread that I want to propose a positioning of the Pengu token as it is in the rest of the crypto market. He compared Pengu to Dogecoin as Solana is to Ethereum. And he calls Pengu, the Pengu token, the first meaningful Dogecoin competitor. And I want to read a little excerpt from his tweet thread where he put this all together.
He says, "Dogecoin resembles the dominance of Ethereum, both highly grassroots ecosystems that grew organically in a fairly decentralized fashion. Solana was written off as it looks nothing like Ethereum, but yet it optimized in the areas that mattered, such as performance and marketing. It had a core team that executed and outpaced everyone else. The headlessness of meme coins are both a weakness and a strength, but most importantly is Pengu's opportunity.
Pengu will win the game of meme coins and out-execute better than anyone. It has a world-class team and one of the biggest communities in crypto that is day in and day out executing and grinding away to win. Like Solana rewrote the rules of engagement for growing blockchains, Pengu will do the same for meme coins too.
In under a month of trading, it has become Solana's biggest meme coin in under 2.5 years. Pudgy Penguins has generated 37 billion views via GIFs, 1.6 million followers on TikTok, 1.7 million followers on Instagram, and 2 million toys sold globally. Pengu's success is
so far is arguably has been largely due to its ability to bring crypto well beyond crypto natives into the broader mass market. Now, I want your opinion, your reflection on that positioning for the Pengu token. How do you like the branding that it is the Dogecoin as Solana is to Ethereum? I think Peter really wrote that eloquently. You know, from our perspective, I think that's our thesis. And now that isn't just our thesis for Pengu. I think that's been our thesis for the last three years.
which I always thought, you know, both NFTs and now memes, you know, are categories with huge PMF and an ever-growing TAM. Yet, for some reason, they're the most underdeveloped out of all of the different categories. And so, you know, figuring this has a huge, you know, finger on the pulse and obviously attracts, you know, consumers in a way that I think very few, you know,
categories really do. You know, I think from our perspective, you know, how do you develop this stuff so that they're more than just non sentient, stagnant, memetic, you know, pictures with, you know, good communities trying to drive that forward. You know, ultimately, when we do things like, you know, put products and toys or do long form content, whether that's a movie or a TV show or games, you
These things are really doing two things. They're creating demand, and they're also creating love and affinity within the existing holder base, which creates conviction. And naturally, tokens are very simple in the sense that they succeed and fail based on the elementary school model of supply and demand.
And, you know, the more demand that you can create and the more conviction you can create with the existing holder base, ultimately you kind of have a path towards success. You know, sometimes you can't control at least what I think happens in the short term. And I think our history at Pudgy Penguins has shown that. But over the course of time, as we continue to push the ball forward and we create more demand by creating more headlines, by bringing new people in through new initiatives, and then also while creating, you know, love and affinity with the existing holder base, ultimately
ultimately you have a recipe for success. And this has ultimately been the playbook that has, you know, driven us, you know, from the best performing NFT project of the last couple of years. I think it's the same line of thought that is going to lead to Pengu's ultimate success and dominance within the meme coin category.
And the hope is really to develop this and kind of set a playbook around memes, which is, you know, memes shouldn't just do nothing. That idea of them doing nothing, I think, is irresponsible. And I've always taken the approach that, you know, if Doge had an operator behind it or one of these major projects had operators behind it, I think they'd be exponentially more successful than they are today for the reasons I just explained. So, you know, I think we're going to be the first real team to give a crack at this thesis. It's going to be one that I think over the course of time is going to reign true and
excited to put our hat in the ring and yet another category. I find the positioning of Pengu as a meme coin interesting because previously that would be considered like insulting, I think, maybe in years past in the crypto world where if you're the founder of a company and somebody is telling you, yeah, your token is a meme coin, your token is a meme, that would historically be an insult. But I think you're kind of turning it on its head and you're saying, well, there's this brand,
called Penguins, Pudgy Penguins. And there's this team that I built that I'm the CEO of, and we are just going to push that brand forward. And that brand is the meme. Explain a little bit more, elaborate a little bit more on how you're kind of like reformatting the idea of a meme coin here. Yeah, I think from our perspective, you know, what can Pengu be? I think it can be a lot of things. And I think it can tap into a lot of different categories. I mean, we could do something on the AI side and
ultimately like insert ourselves into that narrative. We can do things on the gaming side and ultimately insert ourselves into that narrative. I like the memetic category because technically the way that Pengu is structured is very much like a meme coin, but it's more than that. And I think just like saying it's a meme coin, I think is doing it a disservice. It's a culture coin. It's a community coin. It's an ecosystem coin. It could be one day a gaming coin or an AI coin, but I think in its principle, that's the beauty of meme coins is
right, is they can be a lot of different things while still, you know, remaining a meme. If you understand, you know, Pudgy Penguin's marketing strategy and our roots and our origin stories, it's very much memetic culture, right? Like that's how we've gotten this far. That's how we've permeated into the real world. When we're getting 300 million views a day on GIFs, you know, GIFs are memes, right? I said an interesting thing a year ago, but, you know,
The person who controls the GIFs controls the memes, and the person who controls the memes controls the world. GIFs are just embedded memetic distribution in all of the top social networks and media channels. And on 300 million views a day, there is no memetic character that is getting that many impressions a day, not even Doge. And so eventually that will catch up, and that will be priced in at some point. And the goal is to make those numbers even bigger. I think right now that's growing 10% month over month.
I think we could probably get it to 20, 25%. And then ultimately, I think you have a recipe for success. And that's just one vertical, right? There's so many different verticals within what we're doing. But I like the meme coin category because I think technically Pengu is that. The beauty of memes, and this is an unpopular opinion, but they can be many things, right? While also being a meme first.
I kind of look at Pengu as like this meme coin plus plus, right? Which is this idea that like technically it is a meme. The meme category is severely underdeveloped. I mean, literally nobody does anything in the category with the exception of probably Bonk. As I'm getting more entrenched into the ecosystem, I'm starting to learn that Bonk is probably the only meme coin that actually does anything.
And it's been nothing but a net positive for them in many different ways. I mean, it's probably been one of the best meme coins of the, you know, blue chip meme coins of the last couple of years. So give them credit where credit is due. But this idea that they have to remain stagnant and underdeveloped, I think, is fiscally irresponsible. It's doing a huge disservice to the community. It's doing a huge disservice to the character and the IP and the meme.
And ultimately, I think we're going to reinvent that narrative. And so, you know, how do you go into this category that has huge PMF, huge TAM that is severely underdeveloped? How do you develop it and ultimately set the playbook for everybody to follow? I think this is going to follow the exact same trajectory and the exact same playbook that Pudgy Penguins and the NFT has followed. You know, it might not feel like it in real time. Again, like, you know, my take to the community was like, look, you can't control what you can't control in the short term.
But in the mid to long term, it is very obvious to me that this model and this line of thought is the model that's ultimately going to win. And ultimately, it's going to be, you know, which memes are actually doing and building something tangible and real and trying to push the boundary and break the barrier and which ones aren't. And I think the ones that are, you know, trying to push that boundary are ultimately going to be the ones that see the most success. And they'll still be tons of success with the ones that don't do anything. I mean, you'll never be able to stop that. The Pandora's box is now open.
But I think if you really want to ultimately, I think, become a cultural phenomenon, which is the highest point that any of these meme coins can ultimately become.
I think you have to do this or just pray and get lucky and hope that you get lucky, which I think is a recipe for failure and not a recipe for success. Is the world that you're illustrating something like the current instantiation of memes in the crypto space, meme coins, meme tokens in the crypto space is something like Stone Age memes, like caveman era memes where they're just inert and like the pictures are funny and they make us laugh, but they otherwise don't really build and they don't really do much. And what you're trying to do is
help evolve that part of the crypto sector, the meme coin sector, and help bring it into like the industrial era where we can put productivity and growth and development into our meme coins and just bring it into like a higher state of being and a more productive state of being. And it's still memes. They're still memes. They're just better, more engineered memes.
stronger memes and it's just more advanced is that kind of like what you're trying to do here totally i think it's sentience versus non-sentience like ultimately you're not going to be able to beat a driving force that's inserting itself you know in relevancy every week every day every month you know every quarter that recipe is just too much of a successful recipe i think and
And so, you know, I think from our perspective, you know, what does it look like if, you know, you see Shiba Inu, you see some of these huge memetic coins, you know, that have, to be frank, like unparalleled valuations compared to traditional IP. Like, imagine how much could be done with that resource.
I mean, Pepe, you know, Shiba Inu could be on Netflix and Hulu. It should be everywhere, right? You know, Pepe could be everywhere and they should be. And as you guys have seen with Pudgy Penguins in our small little case study, you know, when we do these things like put products in Walmart and do these huge partnerships with, you know, major Asian conglomerates, like, you know,
Like, ultimately, that has been huge for the space. That has made people feel good about the space. That has taken the taboo and the intimidating nature around crypto and made people feel a little more comfortable, made people feel like there was some hope and duly justified, right? And I don't think the era of stagnant memes is ever going to go away. Like, that is
the origin story and the foundation to these things. But again, I think over the course of time, who is really going to lead the charge? Who's going to be an industry leader? Who is going to win this race? I think that is going to be predicated on the people and the groups and the communities to
that rally behind these initiatives and push things forward. And by pushing things forward, I mean more partnerships, more initiatives, more places in which the IP is relevant. And again, don't mid-curve it. When you do these things, these things are simple. They are creating more demand and they are creating more conviction to a finite supply of tokens
which ultimately, if you have enough people holding and enough people creating demand and enough new people participating, then ultimately you get what everybody in crypto majority wants, which is something that goes up into the right. That's just the elephant in the room and you have to sit in it and you have to understand it and you have to realize that is the truth.
predicated and based around that truth. I think it's just a fundamental playbook that again, I'm not really theorizing it at this point. That's why I'm so confident in how I speak about it. Because again, like we didn't beat everyone in NFTs because we had more money than them or because we had more resources. I mean, it was actually the complete opposite of that story, right? There's 60, 70 NFT projects that have more money than us.
even probably today and our success was really predicated around this line of thought and i refuse to believe that that is different in the liquid token land well if we're going to extend this metaphor pengu is to dogecoin as solana is to ethereum solana changed the game as peter said and changed the game of how to build a blockchain and you are changing the game of what it means to build a meme
But then what happens next is that you give other people the roadmap. You give other people the blueprint to follow in your footsteps, which I'm kind of hopeful for because I think multiple different projects being productive around their own memes going in different directions is validating of what you're doing and also is just net good for the space at large.
but I personally haven't seen any. Maybe I'm naive. What does the Solana competitor, the Apto Sui Se of Pengu look like? What's that sector look like? I think right now, I would probably say in the Solana ecosystem, it's probably Bonk. It would probably be the main one, though I don't really look at it as net competitive. I actually really love that team. I think Nam is a phenomenal founder and leader of what they're doing over there. And
Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's one of the first times, Solana is a little interesting in the sense that it's one of the first times I've ever been a part of an ecosystem where I feel like it's not necessarily too PVP. Now, naturally, the chain can be that in the sense that capital rotations and it's really easy to go into one thing and into the next. But working adjacent to some of these founders in the space, you don't really feel the same way. Like in NFT land, it feels super competitive.
And then specifically the Solana ecosystem land, I'm less focused on, you know, how do we beat Bonk? I'm more focused on, you know, why is Shiba Inu still worth $13 billion when we are getting 300 million views a day? And, you know, we are probably the most beloved and popular crypto character of the last couple of years.
And that is where I see the discrepancy. So I don't really look within the Solana ecosystem because it's such like an uplifting ecosystem and one where everyone's like helping each other. It's like super strange to kind of feel that. And I'm more looking at the incumbents and thinking to myself, okay, you know, really looking at Shiba Inu and saying to myself, like, right, I get it. And it had its time, but
I don't see a world where Pengu doesn't beat that. And that's really what I look towards from a competitive standpoint. But Bonk, again, like I said, I think is the only thing in the top 10 that is actually trying to push a needle and move something forward that is trying to be proactive in posting content that is trying to be proactive in creating syncs. And it's maybe taking a little bit of a more like traditional approach, you know, to how people run tokens and then just like a no nothing, you know, meme that just ultimately, you know, does nothing and is nothing.
So I appreciate their stance on it. I actually didn't realize that until maybe a couple of weeks ago that they were so proactive. And I respect that. It's just necessary, right? When you have communities and things that are worth billions of dollars, you have to, you know, if you don't put your best foot forward and you don't try to develop and you don't try to push that boundary, I actually think it leans into the meme coin stigma, which is like, what is this and why is it this way?
Right. And ultimately, I think a huge part of what we've been trying to do over the last couple of years is reinvent that stigma and give people a drop of legitimacy, you know, in something that is really easily digestible and understandable. You go to your barista, you go to your local waiter, you go to the person who is, you know, gardening your front lawn like they understand pudgy penguins is probably one of the most easily digestible things to understand in the right curve normie world.
And that is predicated on the development that we've made. And again, you know, meme coin adoption and meme coin success is predicated on digestibility, normie adoption, all of these things. You know, ultimately, you know, when everyone in the world ultimately catches on that Pengu is existent and that this brand that they've been participating in is actually crypto native, I think, you know, the floodgates will open and then we'll continue on our path to success. I think the most relatable part of the Pudgy Penguin strategy is these GIF productions.
The stats that I have from Peter's tweet thread, I don't know how accurate they are, is 30 billion total views on a pudgy brand, on a pudgy via GIFs. And now last time we had you on, we asked about this and you said, yeah, we just have a team that's just like pumping out GIFs left and right. Can you talk about the impact that has had over the last like 12 months since we last talked?
How has that impacted the brand? How has that driven adoption? What has that really done for the Pudgy brand? Yeah, I said this six months ago, but it's a pretty obvious one. I basically said, if you're a meme team, the first thing that you should be doing is developing gifts. I mean, it is the most underutilized. Now, nobody goes to gifts and no performant marketer like goes to gifts as a marketing strategy because there's no conversion, right? Like if I get a billion views, it's not like I make $10 million in sales. And so it's completely underutilized.
But actually Giphy in a world where you take intangible value, intangible culture, and you tokenize it and you put a value on it, right? With something like GIFs, it is unbelievably powerful, probably the most powerful. And it's the cheapest to probably distribute and to get impressions. I mean, my CPM on GIFs is probably 0.00001 cents.
So the amount of money I spend on a monthly basis on GIFs and the impressions that I get, which is about three and a half billion impressions a month right now, if I told you what it costs, you'd freak out. You'd be like, that's impossible. Now, for most people, again, performant marketers are not going in this direction. But when you're looking at character proliferation, like when you're running a meme coin, again, comes down to supply chain.
and demand how do you create demand it's character proliferation right so if i go and do gifts that's more of my character proliferating into the subconscious of crypto traders and non-crypto traders right if i'm doing a movie right i am proliferating to non-crypto traders into crypto traders and ultimately proliferation segues into the demand it's not maybe instant
It can be, right? Depending on the initiative, I'd probably argue a movie probably is. But, you know, the GIFs create an underbelly, right? Like there's some sort of a minimum float in terms of what Pengu is worth just simply by those GIFs. Assume you do nothing else, right? Because it is embedding yourself into internet culture and into messaging culture and into communication culture and...
in a way that ultimately, I think, contributes to this becoming one day, hopefully, a cultural phenomenon, which, again, is the highest point that I think these things can go. So, you know, it's been a strategy that I think was obvious the second I saw it work, you know, two years ago. It's been one we've continuously leaned into. We'll continue to lean into it. And I think, again, if Penguins does nothing else but continue to scale those gifts, I still think it's a top three meme coin.
because I think it's just too much proliferation and it's too much subconscious marketing that I think will eventually convert. How does the gift system work? Every once in a while, I'm in my iOS, I'm on Telegram, and I'm looking at some gifts. I'm looking for a gift that I want to send, a reaction gift.
a gift to send to a friend. And every once in a while I see a Pengu GIF. I see a Pudgy Penguin GIF and I'm like, oh, interesting. Like, look at that. That's a little penguin GIF in my little library. How does that work? How do the penguin gifts get elevated inside of like literally iOS or Telegram or wherever else I'm sending gifts? How does it go from production to actually like something I can select?
in these apps. - It just, it probably attributes to a couple of different facets. I think the first one and the most important one was three months into me seeing like how powerful this was, 'cause the community ate it up the second we started doing them.
Because we used to do them around people's penguin, right? So, you know, there's pretty much isn't an NFT that's on the floor right now that doesn't have its own gift. So you can kind of tie the two together and it kind of creates again, love and affinity, which creates conviction, right? If you're messaging your friends and family with your gifts of your NFT, you're less likely to sell it because now you're using it as a form of expression, right?
Right. I think the most important one is and I kind of just did this being a marketer staring at it for three months was there's actually a way to index it kind of like how you do SEO on Google. There's a way to do like a gift optimization for those key terms. And then probably the second one is just understanding viral key terms and getting quickly and indexing them quickly enough. So like Riz and like there'll be things within the Internet culture around Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which will start speaking about or trends. Right. Like
you know, if Trump is viral today, right? Like my instruction to the team is 100 Trump gifts now, right? So index for the word. Need more gifts. Need more gifts on the specific category. If Riz is trending, then you'll do Riz. And then you'll kind of just go through the framing. So you also need somebody with a real finger on the pulse to make sure that you're catching those trends, right?
Because like me indexing for something like love is really competitive because everyone's posting love, but no one's competing for Riz, right? And all the kids and all the people that I want are using it, right? And then the influencers are using it and the celebrities are using it and then it just becomes a compounding effect. So those would probably be the two biggest points of alpha. And I don't mind sharing it at this point. Our moat here is so big and-
Yeah, I actually want more people to do it at this point. So it just makes our moat look even cooler. But that's the secret sauce between the two facets of how I think those two things succeed. My intuition here, Luca, is that the reason why this works is because you have a token that monetizes this effort.
by proxy, not directly, like you said, very indirectly, but by embedding the Pudgy Penguin brand into the meme layer, the culture layer of the internet via GIFs that has some feedback into the value of the Penguin token. And I'm guessing that no one else is optimizing for SEO inside of Giphy, inside of like the GIF layer of the internet. So it's free real estate for you, but that real estate is valuable because
Because you have a token, because you have tokenized this brand. And that's really why you can pour resources into embedding the Penguin brand into the gift layer of the internet. Is that correct analysis? Yeah, it's a correct analysis. So unless you're somebody like me who has that type of tokenization mode, or you're like a Disney where you have billions of dollars, like you fiscally can't justify spending $50,000 a month on it if you're not one of those two things. Right.
Right. Like if you don't have a movie or a premier legacy IP, then it makes sense to spend fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a month on that. They should be and none of them are doing it. Right. But that's the nature of some of these conglomerates that have just been stagnant for a long time. And on the other side, I've been making a call to action. All the crypto folks have tokenized assets, which is like
It's not that hard to stand up a team for $25,000 a month at five, six, seven, eight people in different parts of the world that are all like, just have a system and a machine. Like we have a whole backend interface that we built for this. So we have like a whole $150,000, $200,000 build around how the gifts are organized. So it goes in, we have like, we've built it out. So now it's like actually quite literally a machine and a software, but it's really not. And with AI, this was before AI. So with AI, you could probably do it for a 10th of the cost.
and you could build something pretty incredible. To your knowledge, is Disney or some other large brand like that optimizing SEO inside of the GIF layer of the internet? Or is it really, to your knowledge, only you? So the way that we're doing it from an indexing perspective, I wouldn't know unless I talked to one of their teams. But I know there's a couple companies like SpongeBob, like certain IPs really value it and it's been huge for them, right?
You know, the real epiphany for me is when I went to Asia and I learned that Lion Friends built a billion dollar business off of sticker IP. Right. So when you look at, you know, the gifts, the gifts, not just gifts, they're stickers. So you look at, you know, the metric that Peter gave was actually wrong. It's about 40 billion on gift today. So you go to giphy.com slash pudgy penguins. You'll see the number. It's like 39 billion and some change.
So call it 40 billion. But then you have Tenor, which is like another 30 billion. Like I'm giving you the metrics that I know you can go and fact check. But if I give you the metrics that you can't go and fact check because the backend portal will just, you know, there's no way for you to verify it. I mean, it's half a billion views a day, you know, or impressions, right? You know, through these channels.
And they're real. It actually does create a moat for the IP and for the brand. And if you don't believe it from our case study, look at Line Friends, look at some of these other Asian IPs. Asian IPs have completely succeeded off of this one vertical and then obviously growing the brand outside of that. But this is the origin story for a lot of these new next generation IP businesses. So I'm assuming because of the success of this effort, people are sharing the pudgy GIFs
Without knowing that there's like a crypto community, crypto project, crypto token, if they just like are looking for a GIF to react to, to use, to express themselves, they see the Pudgy GIF and they just select that one for whatever reasons. And then that has some positive feedback there.
into the whole ecosystem. Are there any like stories or anecdotes that you can give of like somebody so far away from the Pudgy brand using the Pudgy GIF in some sort of way that has like impacted or brought attention to Pudgy in any sort of way? Yeah, Cynthia Loomis posted the Pudgy money printer, right? When she was talking about one of the things, I mean, you know...
There's so many celebrities and influencers that I can name, you know, biggest K-pop stars in the world. You know, Andrew Tate went on a week when he was just like every day is using pudgy gifts. And do you know that they don't know that there's a crypto project associated with the gifts? Most of the time they don't. Right. But the impact is, is not necessarily like I'm not necessarily too focused on that because I think that crypto is ever growing and eventually it will click.
And that aha moment and that moment of discovery, I think is really meaningful. What's even more meaningful in terms of direct conversion today is when your mom or your girlfriend sends you a pudgy gift and you are in crypto and you're thinking to yourself, like they could have picked any other gift. There was something subconscious about the penguin. And again, that maybe might not drive you to buy Pengu or to buy an NFT, right?
but it'll be the first starting point. So that will be your first point of impression. So touch point number one, then maybe I do a headline that shakes up the space once again. And then you're like, damn,
Right. And then you go to a friend's daughter's birthday and then you see she got a pudgy penguin toy and then you get in all these different touch points. And then at a certain point, it becomes fiscally irresponsible for you if you have NFT exposure or meme coin exposure to not have exposure here because one is clearly impacting and transcending into your everyday life, while the other things that you're rotating in are gambling on or not.
Right. And so then you make the decision, are you a trader or are you an investor? And obviously, I think we've been a great ecosystem for investors for that reason. You know, if you're a trader, that's your prerogative and you have your own plan and your own thesis on how you kind of deploy your capital. But we tend to really have a home for people who invest in things long term because that point of discovery and that sequence has happened many, many times.
Right? You know, just recently a guy in Singapore was at an arcade, you know, in Singapore of all places and at time zone and at time zone, he just saw some pudgy toys in the arcade machine. He went and bought five big pudgies, 20 little pudgies and is now, you know, he crushed, you know, this was a couple of months ago. So, you know, he's now made a ton of money on all of that and now has Pengu and is stoked that he made that revelation and came to that choice and that decision.
And again, that's the recipe, right? That is the line of thought. That's how we've won. I haven't won because I outspent somebody or because we had more resources. We beat everyone, at least, you know, up until this point, because of this line of thought of like, hey, this is how this stuff works. And though it might not give you immediate gratification, it will give you long term success, which is ultimately what we're optimizing for.
Last time we talked, it had been on the back of the Walmart announcement where Walmart was going to be selling physical plushie pudgy penguin toys. And then that went when those went on sale, that went very, very well. I believe Walmart sold out very quickly and had to re-up. And that was also in a very dark era of crypto's histories. Like the penguins at the time defied the status quo by making very real progress.
in the actual in real life world as an NFT brand. But I think that was the last update that I have and that many bankless listeners have about the physical expansion of the Pudgy brand. So what else has been happening? Can you update us on the physical side of the Penguin brand? Yeah, 2 million toys sold, 10,000 retailers, going to be in Walmart again for 2025. So in the three reorders, which
You know, to be frank, David, when I did the Walmart thing, it was a huge risk. We went too big too quick. Thankfully, crypto and the industry stepped up and got our back on that. But that was the brand did not have enough pull to do something like that. But I also knew that I didn't do something like that. That's a once in a lifetime opportunity to do an initiative of that magnitude. You've got to take it and you got to roll the dice and got to put it on the line.
Thankfully, it didn't bite us in the ass. And on the third reorder, you can confidently say, like, we succeeded. Like, we did not fail. And we did not let the industry down, at least on the consumer product side, which I think is pretty beautiful and pretty awesome. I mean, I think it's close to 400,000 people scanned those QR codes and redeemed their NFTs.
That is a beautiful story. In a couple weeks here, I think we'll cross a million paid in licensing to the holders whose NFTs we alchemized and put on those shelves, which is pretty beautiful. A million dollars in real money. I know it's not a lot of money in crypto land,
But a million dollars generated the real way. I mean, that's just a fraction of what was generated. But, you know, a fraction of that being paid to people, that tells a really good story. That tells a... That's a new form of IP creation, the likes of which that was only possible with crypto rails. And in this case, you know, obviously built on Ethereum, ZK Sync, and a lot. So...
you know pretty exciting i think you know we're going to continue on this path in 2025. i know our tree creative officer wants to reinvent our strategy here a little bit we want to go a little more premium in the sense that you know not premium that like we're only going to sell 100 products but you know we're selling like five dollar toys like let our cheapest toy be 12 or 15 up the quality let's just build something that has like a real long-term moat from an ip perspective
And so we'll see what that looks like north of 2025. But, you know, so far, you know, we're going to start off this new year and go through this new year, you know, as we've been going on the physical product side. And maybe we reinvent things at the end of 2025, you know, based on Peter's assessment. The Arbitrum portal is your one-stop hub to entering the Ethereum ecosystem. With over 800 apps, Arbitrum offers something for everyone.
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Okay, so that's the physical side of the Penguin brand. We talked about the GIF layer, the culture layer of the internet, and that's more of the digital side of the Penguin brand. Are there any other components of expanding the Penguin brand that we haven't talked about? Is there anything else, any stone I haven't under overturned?
No, I just would anticipate at some point this year, we're going to announce something huge, I think, on the long-form content side. So whether that's a movie or a TV show, we have two premiere games coming out. One that's like our Club Penguin-style pudgy desktop game, which I think is going to be really exciting. That will be here really soon. We have a mobile game that we've been working on, kind of like a Fall Guys, Stumble Guys, you know, pudgy Penguins version that will be mobile only. I think that game specifically, I'm very confident that I'll break crypto records with that.
I've had a number one product on the app store before with something like this, with the community that we have now with Pengu. I'm confident we'll be the first ever crypto native thing to be number one on the app store across all categories, and we'll be able to hold it for quite a bit of time.
I'm so excited to break that barrier and make history there when the time comes. And, you know, I've got some more things up my sleeve, some big partnerships that I think are akin to Walmart, akin to Target, some of the things that we've done there. The goal for us is in 2025 is we really have to take this thing further than we ever have taken it. And we have to do it in six months rather than three years. And I plan on being held accountable to that standard. I think we will do it.
And so we will just have to see how the year shakes out. But this is very much our year that we cement ourselves as the biggest and the best, not only in NFTs, but in memes. And I also think we'll solidify that in L2s, which we'll probably talk about here shortly. So I very much want to be the consumer conglomerate. This igloo behind me is very much our goal for the holding company that holds all of these different businesses.
is how are we the most important consumer entity within crypto? I think with the number one NFT, the number one or the number two or the number three meme, and the number one or the number two L2, we will very much solidify our position as a consumer conglomerate. So that's a big year for us. Yeah, wow. How big is the conglomerate? Like how many total people, employees are working, you know, are all rowing in the same direction here? About 105 between all the businesses. We're making an acquisition now, which you'll probably see here.
sooner rather than later, 60 people at pudgy, 40 people at abstract five people between, you know, some of the foundations, the holding company and overpass, which probably only has like two or three people at this point. So yeah, definitely elevates you. And so one of the biggest organizations in crypto, I think. So congratulations on all that. I definitely do want to talk about the layer two, but I think there's an order of operations here first, because with chains come tokens and you have a token, but that token was issued on Solana.
So let's talk about that choice, because that caused a bunch of consternation in the Ethereum community and a bunch of chest beating by the Solana community. Maybe talk about the choice to issue the token on the Solana layer one, even while knowing that you have your own layer two under development. Yeah, it's a great question. I think from our side, the plan was actually deployed on abstract. The problem was abstract wasn't ready.
And so were you going to force something that wasn't ready just to do it this way? And I think ultimately, like there's a reason why abstract is not pudgy chain, right? Like they are two separate entities and it's my job to make sure that each one is doing what's in the best interest of their respective communities.
right? And so in this case, you know, pudgies community was best served, in my opinion, going to Solana versus going to any other chain. I believe this because of all of these impressions and all of this viewership and all of this demand that we have outside of the crypto sphere is very clear that those new users are coming in via Solana. And Solana simply just has the best experience for that new user base to come in and to convert. So if I promote, you know,
Pengu on my Instagram and there's a bunch of people who know nothing about, you know, Pengu, but they love the brand and maybe they want to research it and maybe they want to get their beak wet. No pun intended, you know, pointing them to Phantom and Solana is easily the best experience for them. It's really hard to refute that. I can tell you this is somebody who has been working on Ethereum for the last couple of years.
And, you know, you can just see it in the volume, you can see it in the trading behavior. You can also see this force of nature that is the Solana community. I also see opportunity there. Who has really harnessed that force of nature? There's been a couple guys, Mert, Meow, a couple others, but none really in memes that have really sat there and galvanized and rallied the troops and really put their flag into the ground and said, you know, we are going to harness this force of nature.
And I've been a huge fan of that community for a long time. I've been a huge fan of the people within that organization, both in the Solana Foundation and just the kingmakers, right? The thing is, and we'll probably talk about this in a sec, but
the kingmakers of Solana, the guys who made so much money, life-changing money, generational money, right? Whether they're funds or individuals, they are so supportive, right? They're willing to put their money where their mouth is. I don't think there's a single ETH ICO guy who owns a Pudgy Penguin NFT.
And so there's an important delineation there. And these are how ecosystems are made, is how are people coming back and putting it back into the ecosystem. So when I go and reach out to the Solana Foundation, I say, this is something that we want to do. I've got Raj, I've got Toli, I've got Pedro, I've got all of these guys. They're connecting me to Joe and Kyle, and all of them are taking my call within 24, 48 hours.
You know, the big brain guys, they're all figuring out how to support. Mert is running his own company, stops what he's doing and helps build my launch. Like what is going on here? You know, you don't have other things to do and he's just willing to sacrifice. And, you know, I kind of talked about earlier in the call, like
You don't have that on aetherium and you know, I actually talked to some people about this, you know It's also a theorems job is not that you know a theorem I think I was trying to accomplish something different right and we can go into what I think that difference is between Solana and aetherium fundamentally and from an ideological perspective and I think they both serve two really important roots I think for the future of human society But I think when you're looking at you know, I'm going into something I've never done before right never participated in a token launch, you know
You know, I've got, you know, this ecosystem, which again, I wasn't dead set, you know, for obvious reasons. I wanted to stay Ethereum aligned. And then I got on a call with these guys, you know, and then I was like still on the fence. And then I get on another call and I'm like, well, you know, there's so many calls I'm having here and so many introductions. It's almost like the straw that broke the camel's back, which is I think there's two compelling cases for why somebody would launch an Ethereum versus Solana situation.
But, you know, ultimately, when you look at the fundamentals, when you look at, you know, onboarding new users, when you look at the actual support from a foundational level and from a community level, and then you also look at the opportunity in the bar, right? Like, I think there's still a bar to be set on Solana and there's still growth to be had there. And then maybe the last point to it before I hand it off back to you, because I'm sure you have a slew of questions, which is like,
I want pudgy penguins and Pengu to be the face of crypto, not the face of Ethereum, right? This is super important for us. It's been a mission that I've been really clear on for the last couple of years. I have never been chain specific. I've actually been really chain agnostic and trying to go to as many chains as possible, not doing dilutive things, but having a presence because I think that's important. And having maxis is a real situation.
And so, you know, this seemed like a great opportunity where it's like, look, we have our NFT ecosystem that is succeeding in a super meaningful way. And now let's go and unify the two, which at the end of the day, we're all pushing crypto forward. And we, you know, if you guys were to go eat with Toli and Raj and, you know, we put all of our crypto and our business hats aside, we'd all have a great meal and we'd have a good time. And we want to just push this industry forward because there's enough TAM here for everyone to succeed tremendously. Yeah.
the kicker is, is just like, you know, in the short term, obviously we can get a little competitive. And I think that only helps, right? You're seeing the tone shift with on the east side, like that was long overdue. And that is because of the berating from the Solana community and the chest pounding. And somebody has got to give you a run for your money to compete. Mm-hmm.
And obviously, I think Solana is that horse. So I'll hand it off back to you, David, because I'm sure there's a lot to unpack there. Yeah, no, I totally see the logic. It makes a ton of sense to me. And I'm seeing a very similar phenomenon happen, I think, in the AI space or the AI agent space is something that we are covering a lot on Bankless. And the chain tribalism is just not found in the AI agent space. And it's actually quite the opposite. It's much more aggregative of chains and communities more than it is
tribalistic. And that's a refreshing, it's what I want to see for myself in 2025 and moving forward is like there's ways to just operate above the chains. And that's what I see you doing with having Penguin NFTs on Ethereum, the Penguin token on Solana, and then having the brand that is above both of the chains. And I mean above as in like literally at the higher level of the tech stack and
And then it's operating in the real world. And I hope that that is kind of how the industry moves forward. But I do want to kind of just like really nail the point home. Solana brands itself as a consumer chain. It's a consumer chain for people who are building products. And who are you, Luca? You are building a consumer product.
And so it just seems like there was some resonance there. And it's not just in the Solana tech stack that you found. It's also in the social support. The social network was also people helping people build products. And so overall, that just kind of won you over. Is that a fair way to articulate it? I think that's a fair way to articulate it.
Yeah. But what about base? I'm sure Jesse and the base team over there were bummed that they didn't have the opportunity to get the PANGU token launched on base. Where did base stand in your algorithm? Give me that part of the process. Yeah, I think there was no chance that another L2 would do it because we did have a competing L2. So if we're going to launch on an L2, we might as well have it be ours.
And I will say, you know, I try to give his credit where credit is due every time I get on the podcast and base is mentioned. I think Jesse and that team are the epitome of operational excellence and the Ethereum community should be stoked that they have somebody like that. This is a real warrior and a team that has a bunch of champions, but they've also been running around with no competition. And that changes, you know, in a week's time, because it's just like, I think no one's been able to actually, you know, help.
you know, push them on the L2 side. I think right now I don't look at ZK sync or arbitrum or optimism as L2s. I look at them as nucleuses to tech stacks, right? That are ultimately the nucleus to this super chain or the elastic network, whichever one they're trying to push forward. So, you know, from a fundamental, like true L2, I think it's base. And then there's really nobody else.
And then from BASE's perspective, you know, they're running a great ship. If I wasn't launching an L2, it definitely would have been something I considered. I probably would have still went to Solana because, again, I think there is something fundamental when an ecosystem has a token, right? And this is something that BASE is going to have to address at some point.
There's so many people, like I had mentioned, in the Solana ecosystem that put so much money back into the Solana ecosystem off of so much money they made from Solana. And that's a really interesting flywheel. And the Ethereum folks are probably my best piece of advice and probably my biggest piece of resentment over the last couple of years with Ethereum. And realistically, you know, I think Ethereum is doing something for humanity that is so important.
But I felt so much lack of support from huge guys with whose Ethereum has changed their lives order of magnitudes in ways they couldn't even have fathomed. We're talking hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, not understanding that, you know, putting things back into the ecosystem, you know, is so critically important to its success.
Like, don't underestimate the top of NFTs and the top of Ethereum, right? Like how important NFTs really were to the Ethereum ecosystem and to the Ethereum price action. It created real demand for the token that people were participating in and constantly sloshing around. You know, I can just speak to one that's close to home because they're investors and they've been, you know, pretty much mentors to me throughout this journey, the big brain crew. I mean, they'll go chuck, you know, millions of dollars a week into projects and writing it off to zero.
Like they're not even looking to make a profit on it because they're already so deep in Solana. They've won so big into the ecosystem. They look at it as like, well, if these things don't start catching bids and these guys who are building don't see some sort of success or some sort of momentum, like ultimately that's going to stagnate the entire ecosystem. And it's not just one guy doing it. That's one example. There's,
50, 100 guys that are taking this type of approach. And like I said, it was a little bit of a shot and I didn't mean to, but it's like, I don't know one ETH ICO participant who owns a Pudgy Penguin. You're right. Like maybe there's a couple, right? You know, but again, like the main figureheads of Ethereum, they don't participate in that stuff. Right.
And I just think to myself is why. And that is the fundamental crux. It's not necessarily, you know, ideologies. People love the nitpick when things are going wrong, right? So when things are going wrong, everyone will try to nitpick a hundred different things. It's really just momentum into certain core projects within the ecosystem that I think, you know, helps spearhead price action, right?
you know for some of these things and nfts were so big so big for ethereum and it felt like the last couple of years they just let that go to the wayside granted it was a disaster for some of these projects and so i understand the hesitancy but you're going to have to participate in the on-chain economy some way somehow and bolster these builders and make people feel good and put that money to work
And if you lose 10% of your stack doing it, the argument is, is price going to be worth 10% more or 20% more or 30% more because of it? And Solana has proven that the answer is yes. And Ethereum, I think at one point was really doing this well. It felt like in 2021 and in 2020, they were doing this well. And then something somehow over the last couple of years, people were like, oh, we're just retired. We did our job and now it's onto the next guard. But the old guard still very much plays a role.
No, I think you're totally spot on. This is giving me flashbacks to conversations and thoughts and discussions I was having in 2019 to 2020. But it was Ethereum to Bitcoiners where Bitcoiners had made so much money and there was no mechanism for them to recycle their capital back into the ecosystem.
And it was part of that exodus of Bitcoin builders going to Ethereum because of Gitcoin grants. And he's just like, the community was so supportive. And a lot of what you're saying is giving me flashbacks to like an older era of Ethereum. And that all of the stuff that you've described is totally what Ethereum was all about. And slowly that has decayed over the years into something that we are now seeing on Twitter today. We're recording this on the 21st when Ethereum Twitter is having a little bit of a
Cultural schism, I will say. Let me give one bold take because I felt like I should a little bit on Ethereum and I have so much gratitude for that. You know, without Ethereum, all this stuff is different. This whole industry is different. So you got to get pay homage. Homage is due.
I think what Ethereum is doing, from my perspective, I think is creating a necessity for humanity. You know, when I look at it, I don't get mad as an Ethereum holder. I buy Ethereum and I hold it because of what I think its role in creating a decentralized network state and how important I think that is for humans.
Right. Like, I don't look at it as a thing that is like driving to drive value like that. Its intent is to do that. I don't think the Ethereum Foundation and the core devs are like working every day to drive value to Ethereum because that's they have a bigger purpose. Right. And, you know, you just have to pick what you want to support and what thing matters to you. But a decentralized network state that's immutable and censorship resistant is
and can stand the test of time and it's battle tested and you know stays on at all times right like this is really important right especially for things like stablecoin infrastructure and just like how money is going to move in the future on the internet
it is such an important foundational layer. The problem is, is you're now, you know, the loudest people in the room are the people that want value driven to them. And so now you have a little bit of a conundrum where you have a human necessity and a thing that is really important for the foundation of where I think society is going to go over the next couple of years and decades and centuries is
Right. And then you have this idea of like driving value. You know, I look at Solana as like a value driver. Right. You got two guys in the driver's seat with a foundation and these guys are animals. Right. And they're just, you know, they're going at 100 miles an hour and they're just ready to win. Right. It gives me like very competitive, you know, sports team vibes over there, which resonates with me because I'm super like that.
But let's not say that that is amazing while also not saying that what Ethereum is doing is so important for society, right? Because right now it's the only thing that is so far along in this thesis. And I don't think anyone will beat them at that thesis, right? This idea of this immutable network that...
that will always stand the test of time. This is, I think, really, really important. And so regardless of price, I know I will always support Ethereum because I want to support what I think is a layer that will be important for the future of humanity.
And so that's how I delineate it internally. And just so you know, months ago, when things are bad, I'm also as a builder, I'm talking to people like, I wish somebody from Ethereum would help. And they would tell me, they would mentor me and be like, look, well, Ethereum's not built for that, right? There's other chains that are built for what you're looking for, this type of support, this type of things. Like Ethereum's purpose is bigger than you. And I accepted that. And I said, you're right. And that was a big aha moment for me.
So I think it's an important delineation for everyone listening. That's at least how I think of it. And maybe that inspires others to think of it the same way. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Yeah. Vitalik and other Ethereum-less leadership has always been trying to be a bulwark against
the degradation of incumbents and the degradation of like previous systems. And that means kind of just being a bulwark against like driving value, being product focused, all of that sort of things. It's a different level of priorities. And I think the Ethereum project has always been pretty like tunnel visioned in that direction. Okay, that's that conversation. I want to open up where I've been trying to get to, which is abstract chain.
Tell us about abstract chain, why it is, what it is, and then what its future integration into the Pudgy ecosystem will be. Yeah, so I think you're going to see the first crack. And there's some learnings here from Solana, where Solana compromised a little bit on the decentralization of things, which was obviously an important narrative specifically for the Ethereum ecosystem.
They decided to centralize a little bit more. And, you know, Solana, I think, is more decentralized than I think people give it credit for. But I'm not the person to have this argument with people because I'm not the most technically sound, you know, person to debate on it. But, you know, so I'm told it's a little more decentralized than I think people give it credit for. But nonetheless, they compromise a little bit on the centralization and decentralization side to ultimately kind of focus on being performant. Right. And obviously that performance was, you know, that the argument is, is that, you know, blockchains need to be performant.
above all else, which it was an interesting thesis at the time, which I think has since reigned true to some extent. At least I know from the Solana perspectives, you know, mine is probably reigned true to some extent. Now, I think from our perspective, I actually believe there's an interface layer that is a little more centralized than I think people are used to that ultimately is, I think, going to usher in the new era of consumer adoption. And I think it's going to be the new approach that I believe blockchains are going to take moving forward.
And so to give you some clarity, I actually look at most blockchains today like 4chan. And so I say that because if you know how to navigate 4chan, right, there's maybe one central destination and then you can kind of go to different places and do different things. And it can be super beneficial if you know how to navigate it. But if you don't know how to navigate it, it can be super harmful in this case, in the blockchain sense, you could lose all your money.
Right. And so there's this fragmented feel of blockchains today that feel like 4chan. And I think what you're going to see at Abstract is the first crack at this trying to feel like an Instagram. Right. Which is how do you make it a little more curated, a little more interface specific? I think a huge ton of the innovation coming from blockchains moving forward is going to be around the interface layer. Right.
And so what I think you guys will see here by the end of the month, by the end of the month, I'm certain, so this is January, is I think you're going to see something that feels like a consumer crypto terminal, right? Something where you put an email and a password and you're given a smart wallet and you are on this interface and this interface you can trade, you can discover, you can participate, you can make friends, you can stream and watch content and the content that you're watching can ultimately be abstract, you know, ecosystem projects that you then can go and participate in.
But when you think about it, this seems pretty obvious, but there should be, you know, for most ecosystems, there should be one singular domain in which you go to and which you can do everything on chain. And you shouldn't have to leave that domain, right? You shouldn't have to go install an extension. You should be able to do everything through one singular destination. And so the thought process for us was how do we work backwards around like this type of behavior, which is
You know, right now you go tell somebody to do something on Ethereum. Let's say it's my local waiter or barista. You know, it's going to take them forever to kind of get there. Right. Versus if I told them to go to this abstract domain, right, call it, you know, abstract.com for the sake of the conversation. It won't be that. But if you go to abstract.com, you know, and you give a barista or a waiter an action, right, they should be able to fulfill that action fairly quickly. Right. Within minutes.
not hours, which I think if you told somebody to go buy this coin on Ethereum today, it'd probably take them a couple hours to figure it out, somebody who's just new to the space. And this experience has to be completely abstracted. Now that opens up a certain can of worms, but I also think it opens up a ton of opportunity for users to onboard in a way that I think we haven't seen before. And so I think that's going to be what you're going to see from us. I think you're going to see an ecosystem that is predicated around entertainment,
It's predicated around discretionary spending and fun. I want to own fun. I want to own virality. I want to own discretionary spending on EVM. I think you're going to see an experience on the EVM that feels closest to Solana than I think you've ever seen. So you'll be able to swap on this portal, you know, in this terminal. The swaps are instant. You know, there's no signatures. You just swap in and out, just like you would on Phantom. And I think you're going to see a new reinvention around a meta on how
chains reward a certain user base. So there's a stream section on the platform. I think it's going to be one of the most powerful sections, if not the most powerful section on the platform. Well, we're basically going to take some future rewards from an abstract token if and when it comes. And we're basically going to consolidate these rewards to a finite group of people, call it 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 people that are all going to be streaming products on the network
right, advertising and playing games or, you know, trading on the network. And they're going to be rewarded for them bringing people onto the network, whether that's, you know, via their stream, that stream is going to be weighted, you know, via viewership. And if they're pinning, you know, products on that stream that are abstract related, right, so they'll be able to become advertisers for the abstract network and for the abstract ecosystem apps, right?
And I think you'll ultimately be able to take one of crypto's greatest phenomenons, which is this making money out of thin air phenomenon, and take some of that free money and give it to a concentrated group of people, this concentrated group of people being creators, right? I've been a huge believer of this over the last couple of years. I've been screaming this to the marketplaces.
which is like creators are the ones that bring the eyeballs. They're the ones that bring the narrative. They're the ones that bring their audiences and the attention. And the fact that nobody wants to reward creators in crypto or that nobody has built a system to reward creators, I think as simple as this may sound, I think reinvents the entire narrative and the entire meta around how chains TGE and kind of launch these products.
Because I don't think you're going to be able to beat my 1,500, 2,000 creators, the biggest creators and influencers in crypto, all streaming and trying to bolster and benefit my network versus other networks who just don't have that flywheel and that mechanism in place.
I think it's going to be a black hole of attention in L2 land once we launch this. And not only in L2 land, I think a majority of chains outside of Solana and Ethereum, I think any chain wanting to compete with this existing flywheel in place is going to have a hard time competing because creators control the narrative. Content creators are everything. They're the backbones of all the GTMs, of all the PMFs. And don't take my word for it. Just look at the biggest businesses in the world, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. All of these businesses are predicated around the
content creator around the person creating content. And for some reason, nobody in crypto has done it before. And so, you know, if this thing is successful, how do you give $100 million to, you know, 1500 2000 streamers, I think it's going to change everything. So we'll see. But that's a little bit of the TLDR and abstract and ultimately what you're going to see here within the next seven to eight days. Well, Luca, you talk a big game. How does all of that fit into Pudgy Penguins?
How does that overlap with the Penguin brand? Yeah, so you're going to see it here shortly, but there's going to be a tie in between Pengu and Abstract in some meaningful way. One that I think is going to be really exciting for specifically the Pudgy Penguin ecosystem, the Pengu holder and the NFT ecosystem specifically. And you guys will see that sooner rather than later. We were kind of on the verge of trying to push this through and kind of making an announcement there. And that's a big moment. And when that big moment comes to fruition, you guys will see it and you guys will know it.
The other side of it is just like the little things like you want to tip a streamer on abstract. You got to tip them in Pengu, right? It's going to be the way it is. You got to buy some Pengu and give them tips.
tips will be exclusive there you know we'll take a portion of the tips you know we'll burn our portion and obviously the streamers can either align themselves and you know push pengu or they can do whatever they want with it and i think that'll be one all the gifts all the emotes on the platform will be penguin oriented so there'll be a lot of subtle little levers that we can pull but there is one really big lever one that i think a lot of people have been you know talking about and trying to figure out what we're going to do in this respect
And we're probably going to give a lot of clarity there, you know, sooner rather than later. Well, Luca, you have certainly built an empire and it's only two and a half years into it. So it's been very impressive to watch you grow this thing into the ecosystem that you have today. So congratulations on all the success, my man. If,
If somebody is just really learning about the Penguin brand for the first time and they are interested in just learning more, diving deeper, going down the rabbit hole, where should they start? Where should they go? Just give me a follow. LucaNetz on X, PudgyPenguins on X, PudgyPenguins on Instagram, TikTok. Stay apprised with the brand and looking forward to having some of these listeners listening today. Join us in the huddle. Thanks, Luca. One more question for you. I'm on the hunt for podcast guests.
Who is Luca Nets' hero inside or even outside of the crypto space that you would enjoy hearing on Bankless? Who should I go reach out to? I think the most important person for me and my journey has been Primo from Layer Zero. And if you haven't had Primo from Layer Zero, he's been the coolest dude. Brian, yeah. So he's been my biggest mentor, the coolest dude, my biggest support system, always trying to steer me in the right direction. I really love him. Obviously, I love Alex from Nansen. I love...
Talk about Hunter Horsley, you know, from Bitwise. Penguins. These are all pudgy penguin wearers on Twitter, right? I got to show the tribe. Those would be the four people. Matt from VanEck, Hunter from Bitwise. Primo would be at the top of my list from Layer Zero. Obviously, I think what he's doing is probably one of the most important protocols in crypto for obvious reasons. And then Alex from Nansen. I know he's got some cool things cooking. Luca, thanks for coming on Bankless today. Thank you.
Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in even if it's in NFTs. But nonetheless, we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.