Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Author: Wenser ( @wenser2010 )
On June 29, Igloo.Inc, the parent company of the well-known NFT project Pudgy Penguins, officially acquired the on-chain creator economy platform Frame . The latter team will join the company to jointly build the Layer 2 network Abstract Chain designed for on-chain culture and community, and plans to introduce new economic mechanisms to the network. It is understood that the Frame team will be responsible for infrastructure development in the future, such as the NFT market that does not require permission and enforces creator royalties; part of the L2 Gas fee may be used to support creators in the future.
Odaily Planet Daily will systematically introduce this acquisition and the consumer economy ambitions of Pudgy Penguins and its parent company Igloo.Inc in this article.
Frame is back, this time in a different role: the acquired company
It took Frame exactly 5 months to go from the NFT track L2 network to the on-chain creator economy platform that has now been acquired by Pudgy Penguins parent company Igloo.Inc.: On January 30, 2024, when the node originally planned for the mainnet and FRAME token to be launched simultaneously was approaching, Frame officially tweeted that after receiving feedback from the community and learning that some users had problems with airdrop claims, the official has reopened airdrop claims and will postpone the mainnet launch, and specific information will be announced later.
Unexpectedly, the airdrop did not arrive as expected, but the project disappeared for 5 months. The official project account stopped updating, and no other news came out. As a result, many people lamented that NFT is really dead, and even those who announced that they would do NFT L2 could not survive and ran away directly. After all, in December 2023, the project also announced the completion of initial financing, led by Electric Capital and community members. Angel investors and consultants include crypto KOL dingaling, Memeland founder 9 GAG CEO Chen Zhancheng, Azuki founder Zagabond, etc.
At that time, Frame became famous for opening the founding airdrop of FRAME tokens to users who had traded NFTs on the Ethereum mainnet and paid royalties in the past two years. However, it ended in a dismal failure in less than 2 months, and countless NFT players who originally wanted to recover their losses were also very disappointed about this.
Until June 29, the official account of Frame first released a suggestive emoji tweet ; then it officially announced the news of its acquisition by Igloo.Inc, the parent company of Pudgy Penguins, and mentioned: Frame will subsequently participate in the construction of @AbstractChain, a consumer crypto-economic blockchain network dedicated to the development of culture, community and creativity.
In addition, Frame officials mentioned in the announcement that Abstract Chain will use ZK stacks cryptography technology and EigenDA to provide builders with a secure, ultra-fast, low-cost, and developer-friendly construction environment. The rewards previously received by FRAME token recipients will be redeemed in Abstract Chains native incentive system.
Chain abstraction, abstract chain
An NFT L2 project that was originally a relative failure has since transformed itself into an important part of the Fat Penguin IP Group.
The Fat Penguin IP empire has added another member: Is the Trident taking shape?
After Frame officially announced its acquisition, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz also forwarded the news and published a long article to give a complete explanation of the matter.
He mentioned: We are pleased to announce that we have acquired @frame_xyz and its team to contribute to the construction of @AbstractChain . Through subsequent cooperation, we will provide the necessary infrastructure and distribution mechanism to introduce cryptocurrencies to the consumer cryptocurrency revolution. The focus of the existing L2 has always been on technological innovation rather than cultural expansion. In my opinion, L2 is the track of the cultural economy on the chain. In order to drive this economy, you need to take into account the community, culture, and distribution mechanism, and I believe that no one in the cryptocurrency field does better than us in these three things. Our mission has always been to bring cryptocurrency to the masses, and this acquisition marks an important step towards achieving this goal.
While building @pudgypenguins , we discovered an unfortunate truth: current L2s are not ready for the consumer crypto revolution. This acquisition allows us to address these challenges head-on and create an ecosystem that supports and enhances the consumer crypto experience. I’m looking forward to working closely with @cashbowie and @0xcygaar (Abstract Chain’s 2 co-founders) to build the world’s largest on-chain community, giving builders the users they need and users the products they want.”
It is worth mentioning that @cashbowie previously worked at ZKsync ( @zksync ) and Activision Blizzard ( @Activision , @Blizzard_Ent ); @0x cygaa is a contributor to the ERC-721 A token standard and is active in the cryptocurrency field. He has joined the NFT trading protocol Sudoswap and served as a Mocaverse consultant.
As an NFT Layer 2 chain, Frame has been silent since it announced the extension of the airdrop pre-claim period on January 30 this year. Until last week, Frame finally made a big move - the chain was acquired by Igloo, the newly established parent company of Pudgy Penguins.
On June 23, Pudgy Penguins and its NFT licensing platform OverpassIP jointly established the parent company Igloo.Inc. The official announcement revealed that the company is composed of Pudgy Penguins, OverpassIP and another undisclosed entity. Its official Medium page shows that it will be committed to building a Web3 mainstream IP ecosystem and infrastructure to support on-chain brand building and consumer engagement.
Now, the truth about the “other undisclosed entity” has finally been revealed - it is Frame and the Abstract Chain that will be created in the future .
Abstract Chain official account promotional materials
At this point, the three major territories of the Igloo.Inc ecosystem, the IP empire behind the Fat Penguin, have finally been revealed one by one, namely the NFT IP project Pudgy Penguins , the NFT IP licensing platform OverpassIP , and the consumer economy blockchain network Abstract Chain reorganized by the Frame project.
Subsequently, Abstract Chain will become the underlying infrastructure for building more applications and scenarios, Pudgy Penguins will become the starting point and link for expanding and deriving more valuable products in the form of digital assets and IP symbols, and OverpassIP will play the role of generating commercial value returns and building a business model platform for a circular economy, jointly creating the complete map of the Fat Penguin IP Empire.
In addition, it is noteworthy that in the announcement of this acquisition, the official account of Frame, the official account of Pudgy Penguins and Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz used some words frequently, which may reveal the next development ambition of the nascent IP empire of Fat Penguin, that is - Targeting mass consumers , promoting large-scale adoption of Crypto , and building the worlds largest on-chain community (Consumer Crypto Revolution, Next Generation of Consumer Crypto Adoption, Build the Worlds Biggest Onchain Community).
Abstract Chain: Subverting Base and building the worlds largest Onchain Community?
As early as June 2023, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz said in an interview that the Web3 IP licensing market called Overpass would be launched as early as late June.
At the time, he believed that the NFT licensing mechanism would transform the industry from a Ponzi economics model and promote sustainable growth of projects by focusing on tangible, real-world revenue. Overpass aims to simplify and solve the current complex and cumbersome licensing process through blockchain technology. Unlike the liability form of creating virtual assets and airdrops, the Overpass model represents a paradigm shift. The platform will allow commercial entities to obtain intellectual property licenses directly from NFT holders and use them in their products and tools, providing holders with a scalable way to obtain monetary benefits.
Although it was not until the end of January this year that the platform beta version was officially released and launched, the Pudgy Toys Chapter 2 authorization based on the Pudgy Penguin IP (including 88 Pudgy Penguins and Lil Pudgy) was launched.
It can be said that it is this step that truly lays the foundation for the NFT IP licensing business model, and thereby opens up greater imagination for the commercial value development of NFT IP. After all, the connection between on-chain assets and off-chain real-world IP authentication and licensing requires the existence of such a bridge role.
Moreover, from an individual perspective, OverpassIP provides NFT holders with a feasible IP licensing economic return model; and from a capital perspective, this will be an excellent opportunity to link a market of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. It is no wonder that Hunter Horsly, CEO of Bitwise, a well-known asset management company with a fund management scale of over 3 billion US dollars, recently highly praised the work done by Luca Netz, Pudgy Penguins and Igloo.Inc in the past few years as an early holder, and emphasized that Luca Netz and his team are doing hard and important work: they will bring millions of people into the crypto field. Coincidentally, on June 24, the asset management agency VanEck changed the avatar of the official account of the X platform to Pudgy Penguins, and received enthusiastic feedback from the fat penguin community and the crypto community.
In addition, Pudgy Penguins previous achievements in offline retail are also eye-catching: On May 17, 2023, Pudgy Penguins physical doll Pudgy Toys was launched on Amazon Mall, and then set an impressive record of sales of more than 20,000 within two days of release, and sales of more than 500,000 US dollars, which once surpassed the physical products of well-known IPs such as Barbie, Lego and Pokémon. You know, in the first two days of sale, only American users can buy it. Later, in an in-depth interview with Luca Netz by Odaily Planet Daily, he mentioned that Fat Penguins retail sales have reached 10 million US dollars, and the social media exposure volume is as high as billions of times per month.
It can be said that based on past achievements, Fat Penguin has been at the forefront of the cryptocurrency industry in terms of consumer economy, and the emergence of Abstract Chain is to serve a broader scenario economy and experience economy.
Based on Abstract Chain, Fat Penguin can not only further stimulate the vitality of the creator economy, but also open up unlimited possibilities for more consumer economy applications - as Luca Netz said in an interview before : We are not a childrens 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 everyone can love. I think if cryptocurrency and blockchain want to succeed, this is the kind of consumer network we must reach. This is very important. We are open to everyone. This is the beauty of penguins. You can belong to any ethnic group, any age, any interest point, you can like the image of penguins.
Assets or products may have circulation boundaries, but brands that build a consumer economic system will transcend boundaries.
From this perspective, what Abstract Chain, Fat Penguin, OverpassIP platform, and Igloo.Inc Group want to do is highly consistent with the Base ecosystem, which aims to guide 1 billion users into the on-chain society. Fat Penguin, which already has physical products as a leader, is one or even several steps ahead of Base in this regard. Building the worlds largest Onchain Community may really be more than just talk, but a very tempting and achievable goal.
Conclusion: Aiming at the whole chain economic map, the fat penguin is aiming for something big
If Bases full-chain economic development route is from crypto-native to mainstream people, then the development route chosen by Fat Penguin is more inclined to two-pronged approach - on the one hand, attracting early high-quality seed users through crypto-native assets; on the other hand, focusing on building an IP economic bridge, attracting wider attention through offline physical toys, and developing a business model with a higher ceiling to connect the Web2 and Web3 worlds.
In August 2023, after the success of physical toys, community members questioned the 0 return for NFT holders. Luca Netz responded positively and proposed the NFT value accumulation pipeline model . Now it seems that he has always adhered to his own route and continuously promoted the improvement of the Fat Penguin IP map.
In the future, whether more NFT projects can replicate the value miracle of the fat penguin may be worthy of the continued attention and strong support of every one of us crypto players.
NFT value accumulation pipeline model