Pudgy Penguins, a beloved NFT project, has voted out its founders on Thursday after they allegedly failed to deliver on stated goals and drained the treasury of funds. And now an increasing number of people are arguing that the entire project should be decentralised, potentially an industry first.
Pudgy Penguins was launched in July and has become one of the most successful NFT projects. The cute penguin NFTs have raised over 45,400 ETH in sales on NFT marketplace OpenSea. NFT stands for “non-fungible tokens,” a subcategory of cryptocurrencies that represents ownership in a unique asset.
The collection of 8,888 chubby penguins, that wear accessories such as baseball caps and fishing rods, were available to mint last July for 0.03 ETH and sold out in less than 20 minutes.
According to Twitter user and Pudgy Penguins owner @9x9x9eth, Pudgy Penguins co-founder Cole Thereum “promised a game, a token, an educational book on NFTs and more” to the community last September.
“After a half year, they still have not yet set up the team, they are still in the stage of hiring,” 9x9x9 revealed over Twitter.
9x9x9 has publicly stated that he has spent nearly 600 ETH on the collection and holds 242 Pudgy Penguins NFTs and one rare “banana” penguin, purchased for 100 ETH.
Pudgy Penguins pseudonymous co-founders Cole Thereum and Twitter user @tubbyfat didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment via Twitter direct message.
On Wednesday evening, 9x9x9 published a Twitter thread claiming the Pudgy Penguins founders were looking to abandon the project and offered to sell him its shell for 888 ETH (about $2.8 million). The offer was promptly turned down.
Since the tweets went live, the price of a Pudgy Penguin shot up from about 0.6 ETH ($1,860) on Wednesday evening to 1.7 ETH ($5,270) as of press time.
Now, the penguin project has received buyout offers as high as 750 ETH ($2.3 million) from other prominent individuals in the NFT market, including Mintable co-founder Zach Burks, NFT collector @beaniemax and Netz Capital’s Luca Netz.
Others in the community have voiced concerns about a buyout. NFT hedge fund Starry Night Capital’s @Vince_Van_Dough and eGirl Capital’s @loomdart – other prominent stakeholders in the project – have floated the idea of migrating the community to a new project that would be called Wrapped Penguins.
