DWF Ventures: Interpreting 4 Major Trending NFT Token Trends

Author: DWF Ventures

Compiled by: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

The NFT space experienced a boom during the "NFT Summer" of 2021 and peaked in early 2022. However, since then, there has been a significant decline in activity.

Recently, with the token launches of @pudgypenguins and @Azuki, the popularity of NFTs has seen a resurgence.

Let's take a closer look at the recent NFT token trends.

Key Points

1. Despite the slowdown in the NFT space over the past two years, developers are still actively building and creating more added value for their ecosystems (e.g., launching new tokens and new chains).
2. "Infrastructure layout" has become a new trend for OG NFT projects. Pudgy Penguins (L2), Azuki (L3), BAYC (L3), and Memeland (L2) have all entered the infrastructure space, creating new blockchain networks. Notably, BAYC and Memeland decided to establish their own new chains a few months after launching their tokens.
3. The recent issuance of $PENGU and $ANIME may inspire other NFT projects to follow suit. Therefore, we may see more NFT projects launching new tokens in the coming year.

Key NFT Projects

To better understand the current NFT ecosystem, we will analyze the following projects and their token strategies: Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, BoredApeYC, and Memeland.

Pudgy Penguins

Pudgy Penguins has two related tokens: $PENGU (community/meme token) and @Abstract_Eco (L2). In December 2024, $PENGU was launched on Solana, with over 50% of the tokens distributed to the community through airdrops. Influenced by the expectations of the airdrop, the floor price of Pudgy NFTs reached a historic high of 35 ETH. As of now, according to @Dune data, $PENGU has 615,000 on-chain holders.

AbstractChain is a consumer-facing zk-rollup L2, formerly known as Frame, which was acquired by @IglooInc. Although the related tokens have not yet been issued, both the Abstract and Pudgy communities are looking forward to the Abstract mainnet planned for launch in Q1 2025.

Azuki

@Azuki launched the @animecoin token this month. Following the announcement, its NFT floor price rose by 2 ETH. $ANIME is tied to AnimeChain, an L3 chain focused on anime (built on Arbitrum Orbit). Similar to $PENGU, $ANIME plans to allocate over 50% of the tokens to the community. Aside from the company and team/advisors portion, the remaining tokens will be fully unlocked at the time of issuance.

Memeland

@Memeland is a Web3-focused game studio that has launched multiple games and NFT series. In April 2023, Memeland launched the $MEME token and covered all Memeland NFT series, including MVP, Captainz, and Potatoz, through airdrops.

A year later, Memeland launched Memenet, an Ethereum-based L2 network.

BAYC

@yugalabs is the company behind the NFT series @BoredApeYC and MAYC. In May 2022, they launched @apecoin, the first blue-chip NFT token on the market. $APE is the governance and utility token used within the APE ecosystem.

In September 2024, they also launched ApeChain, a network similar to @Azuki's AnimeChain, which is an @arbitrum Orbit L3 network. In line with the strategy of $APE, ApeChain was released a few months after the token launch.