The Penguin Proliferation Thesis

Although I was taking a break from writing over the past few weeks, this industry doesn’t rest. One team that kept busy for much of the holiday season was Pudgy Penguins, hot off the heels of their PENGU token launch.

GIFs

When it comes to Pudgies and GIFs, they’ve spearheaded the growth hack for years, going from half a billion GIF views on GIPHY to over 38 billion GIF views in around 2 years. This gives the community’s term of ‘penguin proliferation’ some real weight, on top of other efforts including physical toys, Pudgy World (still in beta), a mobile game launching later this year, and more.

Despite Pudgy’s success with GIFs, what’s always piqued my interest has been how Pudgy GIFs have dominated certain platforms with GIF integrations, while lacked on others.

For example, when searching for the terms ‘Pudgy Penguins’ and ‘penguins’ on X vs. Apple’s iMessage #images feature, you can see a stark contrast in the Pudgy GIFs that pop up.

It seems that X and iMessage pull from different GIF sources, or iMessage has a filtered curation process. But when I was wishing friends and family a Happy New Year a couple weeks ago, the unexpected happened when I searched for the typical terms while searching for fun GIFs to send:

Multiple Pudgy New Year’s themed GIFs popped up! I’m not sure what the team did here to get to the top of iMessage’s search results (or maybe luck? doubt it). Bravo team, you guys cracked it for some high value search terms on iMessage!

Memes and Culture

Over the past several months Pudgy Penguins have also inserted themselves into cultural sphere, particularly with content creators. One notable example prior to the launch of PENGU has been Kai Cenat (Twitch’s most subscribed streamer) featuring a Pudgy toy figurine on livestream.

After the launch of PENGU, the features have been dialed up to 11 and in more creative ways:

Featured in multiple videos with Vexbolts, creator of the ‘let him cook!’ meme (934k and 673k likes respectively)
Gifted Yung Gravy (up-and-coming rapper) a large Pudgy plush, along with a PFP change on X (413k followers)
FaZe Clan members getting into shenanigans with a large Pudgy plush
Featured as a backup dancer in a We Bring The BOOM! performance (68k concurrent viewers)
Featured in memes by top X meme accounts (6.6M, 106k, 55k views respectively)

On the other more serious end of the spectrum:

Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder and VC) replies to a Pudgy holder with ‘nice pudgy’. I don’t think was promoted…so pretty cool that he’s aware of Pudgies
Luca Netz is interviewed on NYSE TV

The team is taking a barbell strategy with memes and fun content on one end for mainstream audiences while courting investors with deep pockets on the other.

Considering the fact that we’re just 2 weeks into 2025, I have a feeling we’ll see more penguins in unexpected places for the rest of the year and the penguin proliferation thesis will come true.

Have you seen a GIF before? If so, share or subscribe!

More Vector observations

After my piece on Vector earlier this week, the social layer of the trading app continues to provide interesting nuggets.

Vectorbot

Vectorobot is an account on Vector that autobuys tiny amounts of its own token to make broadcasts promoting the token.

The purpose of the token isn’t to buy low and sell high but rather be a marketing tool for other tokens’ awareness via making thousands of buys + broadcasts, reaching the top of the broadcast leaderboard for other users to notice and potentially trade.

Vector users eventually caught wind of Vectorbot and the token quickly pumped to a $1.3 million market cap before quickly crashing 95%. Ahhhh the sweet sweet life of a shitcoin.

What’s notable to me about Vectorbot is that the Vector the app is already having unique platform-specific efforts. In this case, it’s a marketing bot that promotes other tokens in-app. As stated in the token’s description:

We dont want only broadcast ourself. We want to help other nice projects to gain attention for what they doing (preferably vector projects).
We will be very selective in which project we going to collaborate with.

And as a proof of concept, Vectorbot bumped FOMO to 1000 broadcasts to show what it could do for other tokens in the app.

It remains to be seen if more creative efforts like Vectorbot pop up to manipulate the Broadcast rankings, which reminds me of incentivized downloads in the mobile app world to reach the top of download rankings in app stores.

And in response, will the team do anything to address this? For now, it’s an interesting development that may spawn more creative hacks.

Tipping from buys off of broadcasts

There are a few common paths to swapping for a token on Vector:

Getting a notification of a broadcast and swapping from there. The broadcaster receives 25% of the 1% trading fee as an incentive to get users to broadcast more.
Searching for a token directly
If you already hold the token, tapping on it in your wallet and swapping

The actions taken for #3 make sense, but there have been instances where #3 takes on the behavior of #1 as a way to ‘tip’ someone with the 25% fee referral, while broadcasting a shoutout towards the tipped individual.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to take a screenshot of this behavior, but this another unique in-app social interaction.

Where could this be applied? Holders of a token can tip fellow community members and broadcast a shoutout or thank them for a different money-making call, which reminds me of tipping with DEGEN on Warpcast.

I expect to see more novel behaviors and interactions unique to the app because…well, we haven’t really seen an app like this.

See you next week!