I Joined a Penguin NFT Club. Here’s What Happened. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/technology/penguin-nft-club.html
Par Kevin Roose
I decided to join the Pudgy Penguins because … well, it’s August and I’m bored. But I also wanted to explore a more serious undercurrent. For years, technologists have been predicting the rise of the “metaverse,” an all-encompassing digital world that will eventually have its own forms of identity, community and governance. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, recently said the social network would pivot to becoming a “metaverse company.” Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, has also bet big on the metaverse, raising $1 billion to build its own version of digital reality.
Metaverse enthusiasts believe that our digital identities will eventually become just as meaningful as our offline selves, and that we’ll spend our money accordingly. Instead of putting art on the walls of our homes, they predict, we’ll put NFTs in our virtual Zoom backgrounds. Instead of buying new clothes, we’ll splurge on premium skins for our V.R. avatars.
Pudgy Penguins, and similar NFT projects, are a bet on this digitized future.
“The way I describe it to my family members and friends is like, people buy Supreme clothes, or they buy a Rolex,” Clayton Patterson, 23, one of the founders of Pudgy Penguins, told me in an interview. “There are all these ways to tell everyone that you’re wealthy. But a lot of those things can actually be faked. And with an NFT, you can’t fake it.”
The first community NFT was the CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 pixelated characters that was sold starting in 2017. They became a luxury status symbol, with single images selling for millions of dollars, and paved the way for other community NFTs, including the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a group of 10,000 cartoon primates that now sell for upward of $45,000 apiece.
Mr. Patterson and his co-founders hope that Pudgy Penguins will end up joining the NFT pantheon. The original collection sold out within 20 minutes, and more than $25 million worth of them have changed hands overall, according to NFT Stats, a website that aggregates data on NFT sales. Early this week, it was still possible to score a penguin for a few thousand dollars, but penguins with rare features, such as different-colored backgrounds or gold medals around their necks, can go for much more. The most expensive was Pudgy Penguin #6873, which sold for $469,000.
They were a gift, Mr. Patterson said, in appreciation of my willingness to learn about the community. (Since I can’t ethically accept gifts, I’ll be sending my Pudgy Penguins back to Mr. Patterson after this column publishes.)
I then joined the Pudgy Penguin Discord server, where I was greeted by a throng of fellow owners who were excited to see me, not least because they thought getting attention from The Times would increase the value of their own penguins. (After I received my images, I got offers to buy them for thousands of dollars.) The co-founders of Pudgy Penguins earn a royalty every time a penguin is sold, but other owners stand to profit only if they can resell their penguins for more than they paid.
To the uninitiated, Pudgy Penguins may seem fundamentally pointless, and in some ways, they are. But I wouldn’t bet against them for the same reason I wouldn’t bet against the continued appeal of blue check marks on Twitter or O.G. Instagram user names. Humans are status-seeking creatures, always looking for new ways to elevate ourselves above the pack. The first iteration of the internet tended to flatten status distinctions, or at least make them harder to pin down — “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” went the proverb — but newer technologies, including NFTs, have allowed for more obvious kinds of signaling.