Can Chubby Penguins Shoulder the Banner of Consumer Economy Rethinking Frame Acquisition Abstract Chain Building and Base Disruption

Infrastructure
Puzzle, is Pudgy Penguins really playing this time?
By Wenser
On June 29th, the well-known NFT project Pudgy Penguins’ parent company Igloo.Inc officially acquired the on-chain creator economy platform Frame. The Frame team will join the company to jointly build the Layer 2 network Abstract Chain, specifically designed for on-chain culture and community design. They plan to introduce new economic mechanisms on this network. It is understood that the Frame team will be responsible for infrastructure development, such as an NFT marketplace that does not require permission and enforces creator royalties. They may also use part of the L2 Gas fees to support creators.
Odaily Star Daily will introduce this acquisition and the “consumer economy” ambitions of Pudgy Penguins and its parent company Igloo.Inc in this article.
Frame is making a comeback, but this time in a different role: the acquired party. From being an L2 network in the NFT field to being acquired by Pudgy Penguins’ parent company Igloo.Inc, Frame has undergone a transformation in just 5 months. On January 30, 2024, when the mainnet and FRAME token were originally planned to go live, Frame announced in a tweet that they had received community feedback and learned about issues with the airdrop claiming process. They reopened the airdrop claiming and postponed the mainnet launch. More details will be announced later.
Unexpectedly, the airdrop did not happen as scheduled, and what followed was five months of silence from the project. The official Twitter account stopped updating, and there was no other news. This led many people to lament, “NFT is really dead. Even the announcement of doing an NFT L2 couldn’t survive and just ran away.” After all, in December 2023, the project announced that it had completed its initial financing, led by Electric Capital and community members. Angel investors and advisors included crypto KOL dingaling, Memeland founder and 9GAG CEO Chen Zhancheng, and Azuki founder Zagabond.
At that time, Frame gained attention by offering airdrops of FRAME tokens to users who had traded NFTs on the Ethereum mainnet and paid royalties within the past two years. However, it quickly faded away in less than two months, leaving many NFT players who had hoped to “recoup their losses” disappointed.
On June 29th, the official Frame account first tweeted a suggestive emoji, and then announced the acquisition by Pudgy Penguins’ parent company Igloo.Inc. They mentioned that Frame will participate in building @AbstractChain, a consumer crypto economic blockchain network dedicated to the development of culture, community, and creativity.
In addition, Frame’s official announcement mentioned that Abstract Chain will use ZK stack cryptographic technology and EigenDA to provide builders with a secure, high-speed, low-cost, and developer-friendly environment. The rewards previously obtained by FRAME token holders will be realized in the native incentive system of Abstract Chain.


Abstract Chain official promotional material
This once relatively unsuccessful NFT L2 project has now become an important part of the Pudgy Penguins IP empire.
The Pudgy Penguins IP empire gains another member: the trident is taking shape?
After Frame announced the acquisition, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz retweeted the news and published a long article explaining the matter in detail.
He mentioned: “We are excited to announce that we have acquired @frame_xyz and its team to contribute to the construction of @AbstractChain. Through future cooperation, we will provide the necessary infrastructure and distribution mechanisms to introduce cryptocurrencies into the consumer crypto revolution. The focus of existing L2 has always been on technological innovation, rather than cultural expansion. In my opinion, L2 is the track for on-chain cultural economy. To promote this economy, you need to consider the community, culture, and distribution mechanisms. I believe that no one in the cryptocurrency field is better at these three things than us. Our mission has always been to bring cryptocurrencies to the general public, and this acquisition is an important step towards achieving that goal.
Earlier, when we were building @pudgypenguins, we discovered an unfortunate fact: the current L2 is not prepared for the consumer crypto revolution. This acquisition allows us to directly address these challenges and create an ecosystem that supports and enhances the consumer crypto experience. I am looking forward to working closely with @cashbowie and @0xcygaar (the two co-founders of Abstract Chain) to build the world’s largest on-chain community and provide builders with the users they need and users with the products they want.”
It is worth mentioning that @cashbowie previously worked at ZKsync, Activision, and Blizzard Entertainment, while @0xcygaar is a contributor to the ERC-721 A token standard and has been active in the cryptocurrency field, having joined NFT trading protocol Sudoswap and served as an advisor to Mocaverse.
As an NFT Layer 2 chain, Frame has been silent on its official Twitter account since extending the pre-claim period for the airdrop on January 30th this year. It was not until last week that Frame finally made a move. The chain was acquired by Pudgy Penguins’ newly established parent company Igloo.
On June 23rd, when Pudgy Penguins and its NFT licensing platform OverpassIP jointly announced the establishment of Igloo.Inc, it was revealed that the company consists of Pudgy Penguins, OverpassIP, and another undisclosed entity. Its official Medium page shows that it is committed to building the Web3 mainstream IP ecosystem and infrastructure to support on-chain brand building and consumer participation.
Now, the “undisclosed entity” has finally been revealed—it is Frame and the subsequent creation of Abstract Chain.


Abstract Chain official account promotional material
With this, the three major components of the IP empire behind Pudgy Penguins—Igloo.Inc’s ecosystem—have finally been revealed: the NFT IP project Pudgy Penguins, the NFT IP licensing platform OverpassIP, and the consumer economic blockchain network Abstract Chain created from the Frame project.
In the future, Abstract Chain will become the underlying infrastructure for more application and scenario development, Pudgy Penguins will serve as the starting point and link to expand and derive more value products in the form of digital assets and IP symbols, and OverpassIP will play a role in generating commercial value and building a circular economy business model platform. Together, they will create the complete map of the “Pudgy Penguins IP empire.”
Furthermore, it is noteworthy that in the announcement of this acquisition, the official accounts of Frame, Pudgy Penguins, and Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz frequently used certain terms, which may hint at the development ambitions of Pudgy Penguins’ emerging IP empire. These ambitions include “consumer crypto revolution,” “next generation of consumer crypto adoption,” and “building the world’s biggest on-chain community.”
Abstract Chain: Disrupting Base and Building the World’s Largest Onchain Community?
As early as June 2023, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz mentioned in an interview that they planned to launch a Web3 IP licensing marketplace called Overpass in late June.
At that time, he believed that NFT licensing mechanisms would transform the industry from a “Ponzi economics” model and promote sustainable growth by focusing on tangible, real-world revenue. Overpass aims to simplify and solve the current complex and cumbersome licensing processes with blockchain technology. Unlike the debt-like form of creating virtual assets and airdrops, the Overpass model represents a paradigm shift. The platform allows businesses to directly obtain intellectual property licenses from NFT holders and use them for their products and tools, providing a scalable way for holders to earn monetary returns.
Although the platform’s beta version was not officially launched until the end of January this year and only released Pudgy Toys Chapter 2 licensing based on Pudgy Penguin IP (including 88 Pudgy Penguins and Lil Pudgy), it laid the foundation for the NFT IP licensing business model and opened up greater possibilities for the development of NFT IP’s commercial value. After all, the connection between on-chain assets and offline real-world IP authentication and licensing requires the existence of such a “bridge” role.
Moreover, on an individual level, OverpassIP provides NFT holders with a viable “IP licensing economic return model.” From a capital perspective, this will be a great opportunity to connect a market worth hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. It is not surprising that Hunter Horsly, CEO of Bitwise, a well-known asset management company with over $3 billion in assets under management, recently praised Luca Netz, Pudgy Penguins, and Igloo.Inc for the work they have done in the past few years as an early holder. He emphasized, “Luca Netz and his team are doing the hard and important work of bringing millions of people into the crypto space.” Similarly, on June 24th, asset management firm VanEck changed its official account avatar to Pudgy Penguins, and received enthusiastic feedback from the Pudgy Penguins community and the crypto community.
In addition, the achievements of Pudgy Penguins in offline retail are also noteworthy. On May 17, 2023, Pudgy Penguins’ physical plush toys were launched on the Amazon marketplace and set a record of “selling over 20,000 units and generating sales of over $500,000 within two days of release.” It temporarily surpassed well-known IP brands such as Barbie, Lego, and Pokemon in terms of sales of physical products. It is worth noting that only U.S. users could purchase them in the first two days. Later, in a deep interview with Odaily Star Daily, Luca Netz mentioned that the retail sales of Pudgy Penguins had reached $10 million, with billions of social media exposures every month.
Based on past achievements, Pudgy Penguins is already at the forefront of the consumer economy in the cryptocurrency industry, and the emergence of Abstract Chain is to serve a broader scenario economy and experience economy.
With Abstract Chain, Pudgy Penguins can not only further stimulate the vitality of the creator economy but also open up infinite possibilities for more “consumer economy” applications. As Luca Netz previously said in an interview, “We are not a children’s brand, we are a family brand. In a family, there are people of all ages. There are 50-year-old men, 40-year-old women, 5-year-old children, and 20-year-old young people, right? I think this is the key. We are a brand that anyone can love. I think if cryptocurrencies and blockchain want to succeed, this is the kind of consumer network we must reach. This is very important. We are for everyone. That’s the beauty of penguins. You can belong to any race, any age, any interest, and you can love the penguin image.”
While assets or products may have boundaries, brands that build a “consumer economy system” transcend those boundaries.
From this perspective, Abstract Chain and the efforts of Pudgy Penguins, OverpassIP, and Igloo.Inc align closely with Base’s ecosystem goal of “guiding 1 billion users into the on-chain society.” Pudgy Penguins, which already has physical products as a “trigger,” has taken the lead, even several steps ahead of Base, in “building the world’s largest on-chain community.” This goal may not just be empty talk, but a highly appealing and achievable objective.
Conclusion: Aiming at the complete on-chain economic map, Pudgy Penguins has big ambitions
If Base’s development route for the complete on-chain economic map is “from crypto natives to mainstream users,” then Pudgy Penguins’ chosen route leans more towards “making progress on both ends.” On the one hand, they attract early high-quality seed users through crypto-native assets; on the other hand, they focus on building an IP economic bridge, attracting broader attention through offline physical toys, and exploring higher-ceiling business models to bridge the Web2 and Web3 worlds.
In August 2023, after the success of their physical toys, community members questioned the issue of “NFT holders receiving zero returns.” Luca Netz responded positively and proposed the “NFT Value Accumulation Pipeline Model.” Now, it seems that he has been sticking to his route, continuously pushing forward the improvement of the Pudgy Penguins IP empire.
Whether more NFT projects can replicate the “value miracle” of Pudgy Penguins is perhaps worth the continued attention and strong support of every crypto player.


NFT Value Accumulation Pipeline Model
Tags:
Base
Frame
Pudgy Penguins
WEB3
Infrastructure
Airdrop
Source link:
https://www.odaily.news/post/5196419
Note: The opinions expressed in this article only represent the author’s views and do not constitute investment advice.
Original article link: https://www.bitpush.news/articles/6913827
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