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One unlucky trader lost $10,000 purchasing PENGU tokens from Pudgy Penguins shortly before the nft-linked airdrop.
Let it snow, or so one unlucky trader thought when he tried to advance the Pudgy Penguins cryptocurrency airdrop on December 17. While the Pudgy Penguins token (PENGU) surged over $3 billion in market cap just hours after its debut, one investor bought the coin at a ridiculous $14 trillion capitalization.
Their initial $10,000 investment turned into less than $3 in a matter of minutes, according to network data and community observers.
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From $10,000 to $3, PENGU trader sunk by iceberg
Following the on-chain data, an unknown trader seemed to have <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/bx1core/status/1869012514551611662″ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>put a large PENGU order on Jupiter shortly before the token was activated.
These traders, often called “snipers,” use advanced trading tools to quickly get their hands on newly released tokens. However, a glitch on the Jupiter decentralized exchange directed this would-be PENGU sniper into a low-liquidity pool.
DEX aggregators like Jupiter calculate cryptocurrency prices using a system that autonomously adjusts price tags based on demand, known as a bonding curve.
tech-savvy bad actors sometimes manipulate this system to create highly volatile liquidity pools. Since anyone can establish a liquidity position, traders occasionally purchase tokens from the wrong contracts and suffer significant losses.
In this case, the trader likely purchased one of these manipulated liquidity pools without verifying the contract address or the market capitalization of the token. After exchanging 45 wrapped Solana (SOL), the buyer received only 78 tokens valued at less than $5 at the time of writing. Unfazed by the mistake, the trader eventually acquired 62,585 PENGU coins worth about $2,000.
Chubby Penguins Roadmap
The token launch capped Pudgy Penguins' recent rally in a broad non-fungible token renaissance. The nft collection owned by Iglo Inc. was one of the top three nft projects by market cap. A single Pudgy nft costs more than one bitcoin at any given time.
The Penguin-themed blockchain artworks traded for $60,000 on average after the airdrop, as a 50% correction adjusted its price floor to 15.63 Ether (eth).
Looking ahead, Igloo Inc.'s roadmap includes activating PENGU features on the ethereum blockchain. The company also plans to launch its layer 2 Abstract Chain network. Pudgy Penguins' PENGU token has a total supply of 88.88 billion tokens, with seven million addresses eligible for the airdrop.
