In the beginning of January, the Pudgy Penguins huddle had a falling out. Riots broke out in demand for a change in leadership. Luca Netz, among a team of entrepreneurs, stood up to the task. Acquiring an NFT company was not an easy feat, simply because there was no precedent. Thus, the process was extensive and slow. On April 4th, 2022, the acquisition was finalized. 

What we acquired was no more than some smart contracts and social media log-ins, so it was clear to us that we had to build the company’s structure and foundation before we jumped into products and other campaigns. We also took over the company with an empty treasury, and so we have essentially been bootstrapped throughout the year. Even so, we decided to tackle a couple things in tandem, and start our journey with a bang: an incredible yacht party in Miami, where we met our holders in person. 

During the beginning months after the acquisition, we did a whole company rebrand. To solidifying the Pudgy Penguins vision to establishing the Pudgy Penguins brand identity, cohesiveness was key to growing the brand. We went on a sprint to align values between the community and the company, so moving forward we would move as a unit.

From there, we jumped straight to business by putting together an advisory board that consists of people from various industries. While we are confident in our entrepreneurial capabilities, our goals are to explore and innovate on new grounds, and this advisory board helps bridge important gaps between ideas and reality.

Throughout the year, we've brainstormed with the community on a regular basis. We can not stress enough how important and helpful the community has been to the success of Pudgy Penguins, both in ideating and executing on various projects. Let's take a look at what the Pudgy Penguins did in 2022, starting with May.

Month by Month Accomplishments

May - Read more here.

• The build-out of our media platform, Pudgy Media, that is built for The Huddle and all of its amazing aspects to live on. It is a media platform that has Twitter Spaces, monthly updates, recaps, a scrapbook with tweets from the community, Penguin of the Week, and more. It is truly built for The Huddle and fueled by The Huddle.
• We had a Pudgy Miami Yacht Party during F1 weekend and set the standard for events in the Web3 space.

June - Read more here.

• We hosted two NFT NYC events. One was with Shopify, and the other was our private event at SPIN 23, an iconic ping pong social club.

• We released the Pudgy Marketplace, which is our native marketplace fueled by Origin, with a seamless, easier, and safer place to explore and enter The Huddle.

July - Read more here.

• The start of our IP journey with PMI Toys. We announced the launch of our Pudgy toy line, but there was an interesting twist. We licensed Penguins directly from our community and became one of the first projects to think of Web3 IP in this light. We felt that many projects and people talk about IP rights for their communities, but often the holders never have the time, connections, or resources to truly use their IP. After identifying this problem, we knew we had to begin building in this vertical.
• The start of our soulbound implementations. We airdropped the truePengu soulbound token to our community to kick off our qualitative and quantitative identity thesis journey in Web3. We were inspired by Vitalik's white paper on the implementations and use cases for soulbound, non-transferable tokens.
• We began releasing Pudgy GIFs, and as of the writing of this article, we have garnered over one billion views on GIPHY in less than six months.
• We hit 100,000 followers on Instagram through relatable content meant to familiarize the masses with Pudgy Penguins IP.

August - Read more here.

• In August, we really planted our flag in the Web3 space, and it all started with announcing the Penguins we licensed from the community to be used in our toys.

• We also announced our advisory board full of thinkers, executors, and industry titans who will be working alongside us and the community to build Pudgy Penguins into a global brand.

• We announced the Pudgy Children's book, which will also feature Penguins licensed directly from the community.
• We further developed our soulbound thesis and began our penguPins initiative, which are soulbound tokens airdropped to community members that have a true digital impact on The Huddle and Pudgy Penguins.
• Again, we cemented ourselves in the Web3 space.

September - Read more here.

• In September, we took initiative and began to explore and step foot into what storytelling really looks like from a Web3 brand. After understanding the various forms storytelling can take, we released our collaboration video with Non-Fungible Films, and announced that we will be building in this vertical.

• Our asian community hosted a community event in Singapore for all of the holders out in Asia. It was truly a special sight.
• We continued to license more Penguins from the community for the Pudgy Toys, this time licensing more Lil Pudgys.

October - Read more here.

• From a community standpoint, a lot of our community members began launching subcommunities; the first of them was the
• penguPrincesses, which is an all-female lead subsection of the Pudgy Penguins community that started in October and took Twitter by storm.
• Our community team launched Chillin' with Pudgy Penguins, a talk show that airs every Monday night at 8PM EST. Chillin' with Pudgy Penguins has had guests like Alex Svanevik, Jonathan Mann, Andrew Wang, and more, and continues to grow on a weekly basis.

November - Read more here.

• On November 18th, we announced our auction in Sotheby’s, one of the oldest, most internationally recognized auction houses in the world.

• We also launched a soulbound token that came with the Penguin an auction winner got in the auction. This was one of the first times a big company used a soulbound token, and we were thrilled to help Sotheby's do it.

December

• We hosted a very successful Art Basel event with Uniswap being the co-host for the event. We had a lot of influential people like Frank Degods, Pentoshi, and more come out and support the Pudgy Penguins.

• We launched our Building in Public series which is a series that shows the behind the scenes of the building of Pudgy Penguins.

• Overall, in December, our community came together, and the Pudgy Penguins began trending on Twitter. We were featured in countless articles and even printed in the Financial Times. Once again, December shows the world how strong The Huddle truly is.

Other Happenings Scrapbook

Every month, we also include a section in our recap called "other happenings". This is a section that shows both company-level and community-level initiatives that happen within The Huddle. There are a lot of other happenings in a month, so here is a picture that combines all of them and gives perspective to the level of output from the community and team on a monthly basis.

2023 Outlook

We are ecstatic about next year’s outlook. 2023 is when a lot of our products are set to launch, and with those, we will truly embark on our mission to onboard people into Pudgy Penguins and the Web3 world by expanding into new markets in the most seamless and effective way possible. We have several exciting initiatives in the works for the next year, and we are glad you are all on this ride with us.

With goals and opportunities, there are also challenges. We are building innovative, new products using emerging technologies, and thus our journey won’t be an easy one. This space is very competitive, but we chose this route because we know that the Pudgy Penguins brand and community are second to none.

We want to thank every one of you for being part of Pudgy Penguins, and we encourage you to stay tuned for updates every month in the year to come.

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Follow us on Twitter, and join our Discord for more updates. Also, check out our Instagram and  Opensea.

To join the huddle, get a Pudgy Penguin or Lil Pudgy on OpenSea!