One luckless trader lost $10,000 buying Pudgy Penguins’ PENGU tokens shortly before the NFT-tied airdrop.

Let it snow, or so an unlucky trader thought when they tried to front run the Pudgy Penguins crypto airdrop on Dec. 17. While the Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) token surged over $3 billion in market cap just hours after debuting, one investor bought the coin at a ridiculous $14 trillion capitalization. 

Their initial $10,000 investment turned into less than $3 within minutes, according to on-chain data and community observers.

From $10k to $3, PENGU trader sunk by iceberg

Following the on-chain data, an unknown trader appeared to have placed a large PENGU order on Jupiter shortly before the token went live.

Such traders, often referred to as “snipers,” use advanced trading tools to quickly scoop up newly launched tokens. However, a glitch in Jupiter’s decentralized exchange directed this would-be PENGU sniper to a low liquidity pool.

DEX aggregators like Jupiter calculate crypto 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 set up a liquidity position, traders occasionally purchase tokens from incorrect contracts and suffer significant losses.

In this case, the trader likely bought into one of these manipulated liquidity pools without verifying the contract address or token market cap. After swapping 45 wrapped Solana (SOL), the buyer received just 78 tokens valued at under $5 at the time of reporting. Unshaken by the error, the trader eventually acquired 62,585 PENGU coins worth about $2,000.

Pudgy Penguins roadmap

Launching a token crowned Pudgy Penguins’ recent recovery 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 cost more than a Bitcoin at a point.

The Penguin-themed blockchain art pieces traded for $60,000 on average after the airdrop, as a 50% correction adjusted its floor price to 15.63 Ether (ETH).

Looking ahead, Igloo Inc.’s roadmap includes activating PENGU features on Ethereum’s 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 eligible addresses for the airdrop.