rewrite this title Let It Snow: Pudgy Penguins Release Massive $1.5 Billion PENGU Airdrop on Solana – Decrypt

PENGU, the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem token on Solana, launched Tuesday and quickly leapt into the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, with potentially millions of NFT holders and traders eligible to claim tokens in the airdrop.

The Pudgy Penguins token is currently trading for a price of about $0.0335, with a market cap of almost $2.1 billion. That makes it the 76th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, according to data from CoinGecko.

Newly launched tokens are famously volatile, and CoinGecko shows that the token debuted at a price of $0.068 before quickly falling, resulting in the price plunging approximately 51% on the day.

PENGU has a total supply of just over 88.88 billion tokens, and according to a tokenomics breakdown provided before the launch, just over half of that is going towards the airdrop.

That means holders of various Pudgy Penguins NFTs, people who own NFTs from various partnered collections, traders of NFTs across Ethereum and Solana, and even holders of FTT—the ill-fated utility token of collapsed crypto exchange FTX.

With approximately 44.8 billion tokens offered to potentially millions of total eligible claimants, that puts the size of the airdrop at $1.5 billion based on the current price of PENGU. Users have until March 15, 2025 to claim PENGU, otherwise any unclaimed tokens will be permanently locked, effectively removing them from circulation.

Claims opened at approximately 8am ET on Tuesday, but many users reported difficulties going through the process—either claiming tokens at all, or in some cases, suggesting that they received fewer tokens than indicated.

A member of the Pudgy Penguins team tweeted that the project had seen over 100,000 claims in the first hour or so, including 4.7 million visits to the website. The team member suggested that distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDOS attacks, had led to difficulties. They also wrote that anyone who received fewer tokens than allocated can complete the claim process again to get the rest of the PENGU.

Nearly $1.5 billion worth of PENGU has already been traded today, according to CoinGecko, making it the 14th most-traded token within the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Pudgy Penguins NFT prices surged in recent days in anticipation of the airdrop, breaking the $100,000 mark for the first time and coming close to flipping the most valuable profile picture (PFP) collection, CryptoPunks.

But with some holders dumping their NFTs after claiming the tokens, Pudgy prices are plummeting. As of this writing, the NFTs are starting at a price of just over $63,000 worth of Ethereum (ETH) on marketplaces—down 48% from yesterday, per data from NFT Price Floor.