sideweys 🐧✳️

name me a better meme generator in web3 I’ll wait … @FroggyCyborg x @pudgypenguins ❤️🐧

GOING BACK TO THE ROOTS AND JOIN THE CRUSADE

@BrightAvian @pudgypenguins

Pass down the egg @pudgypenguins! 🥚🐧

@BrightAvian @pudgypenguins @LucaNetz good post king

Lemme start this off by saying that I have become complacent last year about @pudgypenguins. In the early phases of the takeover it was pretty clear to me that @LucaNetz and team needed a strong community that is rallying behind them here on CT to make this thing work. At least half of the NFT space hated on penguins for various reasons and never fully accepted them as one of the blue chip NFTs – which however made the huddle hold together and push even harder. Yes, as captured on a VIBES TCG card, Luca did in fact save the Penguins. But long before that the penguin community turned themselves and our beloved penguin NFTs into something that is genuinely cherished by many worth saving ... and before anyone came along to save the penguins, the community fought and rioted and tried hard to save themselves. This is how we got here in the first place. It is also how we made it into a NYT article or raised huge amounts for charity with an auction by @EtheriaChan that featured @cobie, @Cryptopathic, and @loomdart. Fast forward, these old times seem long forgotten in 2026 – just one page in the endless encyclopedia of pengu lore. Luca and team building on the foundation created by the community (as well as the old team and especially the original artist who by a stroke of genius or luck or sheer talent drew this simple, yet captivating and impressive, art, that, we all fell in love with) did a fantastic job. Penguins are seen, liked, and shared on Instagram by couples and people across the globe. Toys made it to Walmart and into the homes of many kids that never even heard the word NFT. Everything felt like smooth sailing now, aside from some envious haters or the occasional – sadly not atypical – PvP between NFT communities, most people were championing penguin now, while many of the former big blue chips died. Everything seemed almost perfect – lean back and enjoy the ride, praise the team for their good work, like & share the new releases and updates, and proliferate the penguin (?!). Well ... in that seemingly perfect smooth ride lies a silent danger. Looking outside projects are dying left and right, meanwhile penguins doing well, good stuff happening. Yeah there might be hiccups, some frustrations, maybe even some true problems ... but things are going much better than elsewhere ... by a landslide ... would be ungrateful to speak up. Just shut up and enjoy the ride ... penghalla is coming! Now ... this creates two big problems: First, we've turned from a community that was very outspoken, constantly sharing feedback, critique, and rioted so hard that we made the old founders leave and sell the project into a seemingly positive yes-men culture that mostly just praised and amplified the work of the team and swallowed most frustrations for a long time now. It is super commendable that the Inner Igloos are still ran without much of any miss on a bi-weekly basis and in theory they offer a good opportunity for feedback (as they did very well in the past). But, while it's exciting how much they grew in listeners, that causes two issues: (1) There is lots of potential input but very limited time and hence it is close to impossible for everyone to speak up or share their thoughts and – imho even more importantly – (2) the vibe changed a lot; it turned from a cozy campfire chat where one could spitball ideas and openly voice concerns and critique as well as constructive feedback to much more of an update session and people expressing gratitude and excitement. This is only natural as the numbers grew, but there has never really been a proper alternative way that found much usage. There are kinda both sides to blame for that. We as the community never really asked for one and the team side failed to recognize that was has been around did not really live up to the task. As such, lots of unheard feedback & frustrations piled up and the disconnect between the community and the team feels somehow larger than ever (kinda excluding Pudgy Asia from that where @FoxyPenguinApe does a fantastic job with especially IRL events & community, but I believe that even in that region similar issues still exist for the CT / "only online" audience). This is very sad to see, because the community and the team being in a strong interlock was one of the superpowers of @pudgypenguins – as stated by @LucaNetz: "you all are the brain, we are the muscle". I do not believe that this general idea and vision changed, but in the last year it has not been working remotely as well as it used too. Sure growing pains and all, but it is a crucial loss and deepens the feeling of disconnect which is dangerous. Two ... "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times (Hopf)". The penguin community, molded in FUD and constantly fighting back in 2021 and 2022, had some of the most impressive and relentless energy ever. Instead of accepting the downfall of the project we constantly pushed forward against all odds – overcoming all obstacles somehow. A lot of this carried over into the bear market and early phases of the 2024/2025 bull market and then slowly fell off. No more fights, smooth sailing, winning. I think this also in parts happened on the team side as well. On the CT community side we saw less and less spaces, less viral stuff, less pengposting (not in total, community grew, resourced grew, but we literally took over CT back in 2021 with a tiny crowd of people; now more and more of us became complacent). It is still good, better than most, but the direction is wrong. On the team side I can only speculate. But it feels like sometimes too much was put on the plate. Smooth sailing and winning can create over-optimism and a bit of hubris. Also having all eyes and attention on one's thing makes it sadly easy to occasionally being taken advantage off in various ways. Combine that with the unfortunate yes-men culture that arose and you get a fairly dangerous combination. Things are still seemingly going very well for now and maybe it is just a feeling of a penguin obsessed random guy, but aside from the obvious bear market some things are not going in an upward direction and need to see a shift and turnaround before they start affecting the broader picture more severely. I've playfully, but only half jokingly, posted about that internship role (which I would be actually down for @LucaNetz) because I do think there needs to be something done about the feeling of disconnect that has arisen as the brand and company scaled, but I have no idea yet if that will go somewhere. However ... we can JUST DO THINGS (thanks to @MINHxDYNASTY for the quote and inspiration) and that is exactly what we used to do in the @pudgypenguins community. It's time to properly lock in again for me. And it's time to lock in again fellow penguins. Now I may have put "True Pengu King" in my Twitter name many years ago because I am retardedly obsessed with penguins (not only the pudgy ones) but a king is nothing on his own and a good king should be a servant of his people ... eh penguins. So for now, if this post sparked any thoughts in you or you have general thoughts, ideas you wanna bounce, frustrations that bother you or anhing else that you wanna vent about, discuss or ideate on feel free to shoot me DMs or book a call with me (calendly in reply below so algo does not punish this post). I'm back to being terminally online this year so I'll make sure to get back to you quickly. I'll also do my best to aggerate and condense any inputs and feedback you all have and will try to push it through to the team in some way (no promises here, but hopeful) and worst case you at least will have an extra place to vent. While it is awesome to see how the fanbase of the penguin is growing all over the globe, I believe its success is hampered if the core is rotten. So let's all together bring the CT huddle back to its former glory fellow penguins – in honor of our lost pengu brother Elmo.

Here are my thoughts on the recent changes to XP distribution on @AbstractChain … dont care, will just keep using the chain whenever I feel like it and steadily make my way to platinum 💚✳️

need 🧢

gen z gen alpha gen @PudgyWorld_ fishing:

rog analysis of the highest order 🎣🫡

@chefgoyardi @ActuallyAgents AI is my penguin, my penguin is AI

Imagine waking up every morning and checking in on your pudgy penguin. Feed it. Talk to it. Build it a lil igloo. Have weirdly deep conversations with it at 7am. AI-powered, sentient-feeling. Lives in PudgyWorld. Would you use this daily?

it’s a @PudgyWorld_ we’re all just living in it 🐧

eyeballmaxxing

where’s polly …

this guy has no idea about OUR club, he has no idea about the players and where they can play on the pitch, he has no idea about the league he’s trying to compete in and the opposition he is up again - admit you made another bad error of judgement with this hire, admit we are now in a desperate situation and make a different appointment aimed at trying to galvanise what is left - someone who actually understands the situation and the best way to try and get out of it

Igor Tudor reacts to tonight's defeat against Crystal Palace 🗣️

original penguin

wait these aren’t pudgy penguins socks 🤯

artificial intelligence is good at parsing snippets of information that might be fact, opinion, lies or whatever and presenting it for what it is human intelligence working in msm is just objectively bad at trying doing the same thing

this is a must watch - ngl never fade @PudgyPartners is the new never fade @LucaNetz 🐧

low key best thing on @AbstractChain @frankythefrog

game changer if x becomes de facto proof of humanity

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

@pudgypenguins sweeeeep

Pengu spotted in Nuremberg at the world’s largest trade fair for toys and games 🐧