Penguin Finance

Penguin Finance was a Solana protocol that sold "liquidity as a service." It let Solana projects buy their own trading liquidity with bonds, so they did not have to rent it with farm rewards. This is the Solana project at png.fi. It is not the Avalanche yield farm of the same name, and not the Pudgy Penguins PENGU token.

It launched on November 25, 2021. It ran a bond market called Neptune, an airdrop tool called Penguin Distributor, a swap and staking pools.

As of October 2026, the project is inactive. The png.fi domain is listed for sale, and the team's last blog post is its second-anniversary review from November 2023. Its swap program is still deployed on-chain.

Is Penguin Finance still active?

No. We found no shutdown announcement, but every public channel has gone quiet. The png.fi domain now shows a domain-marketplace sale page instead of the app. The Penguin Finance Medium blog has published nothing since November 2023. The @png_fi X account returned no posts in our check in October 2026.

The second-anniversary post closed with "We're not going anywhere!" No later update followed.

The on-chain side has outlived the app. The swap program (PSwapMdSai8tjrEXcxFeQth87xC4rRsa4VA5mhGhXkP) is still deployed. In October 2026, Solscan still showed Jupiter JUP$0.242-6.4% swap routes passing through it. So some leftover Penguin pools still fill trades through aggregators, even though the team and front end are gone.

How Penguin Finance bonding worked

Bonding was Penguin Finance's core idea, adapted from the Olympus Pro model on Ethereum. Many early DeFi protocols paid liquidity providers with token emissions, and those providers left when the rewards dried up. Bonds offered another way: a protocol bought liquidity outright and kept it.

The Neptune marketplace post (April 2023) lays out the flow:

1. A protocol lists a bond on the Neptune Bond Market and names the LP tokens it will accept.
2. A user sells those LP tokens to the protocol and gets the protocol's payout token at a discount.
3. The discounted tokens vest over a set period. While they vest, the buyer holds a Vtoken that can be transferred to someone else.
4. Once vesting ends, the Vtoken is redeemed for the payout token.

The protocol ends up owning the LP position and earning its trading fees. Penguin's post also notes it could put that LP into Raydium RAY$1.69-2.8% or Orca farms for extra yield. The buyer gets a discount but carries price risk until the bond vests.

Neptune Bond Market and Penguin Bonds (Treasury Bills)

The Neptune Bond Market was where partner protocols listed their bonds, which Penguin called Treasury Bills or Penguin Bonds. Penguin described it in April 2023 as "the only bonding marketplace on Solana."

To win listings, Penguin ran a grant with Parrot Finance. The deal covered eight-week bonds paired with Parrot's PAI stablecoin. For those, Penguin bought the payout tokens itself for the first two weeks. Penguin also charged nothing for its tools in the early days, per its 2nd anniversary review.

Penguin Distributor: cumulative Merkle airdrops on Solana

Penguin Distributor was an airdrop tool launched on March 1, 2022. According to the launch write-up, the team built it by modifying Saber's Merkle distributor. Each new airdrop adds to a recipient's running total, so people can claim several rounds at once instead of paying fees on each small drop. The tool was free.

Its first users included BunnyDucky, Parrot, Port Finance PORT$0.00082+1.1%, Shoebill and UncleMine. By November 2023, Penguin reported that more than 389,000 distributors had been created with it.

Penguin Finance swap and staking pools

The app at app.png.fi also had a token swap and staking pools. Penguin pitched the staking pools as the second half of a "bonding plus staking" emissions plan: bonds to gather liquidity, staking to reward holders who stay. The swap is the part still visible on-chain today.

Which projects used Penguin Finance bonds

Penguin's blog announced bond or staking partnerships with these projects:

• BunnyDucky, the first Penguin Bond (January 2022)
• UncleMine (March 2022), later the subject of an April 2023 bonding case study
• Solana Sail and Port Finance (April 2022)
• LP Finance and Seeded (May 2022)
• RACE Game and SolLaunch (June 2022)
• Glitter Finance, for liquidity in its bridged token pairs (December 2022)
• Mises Browser (February 2023)

Each of these has a post in the blog's sitemap.

Penguin Finance on Solana vs Penguin Finance on Avalanche

Search for "Penguin Finance crypto" and you will often find a different project. That one is a yield farm on Avalanche, with its own token, PEFI. It has no tie to the Solana protocol on this page. Nor does the Pudgy Penguins PENGU token.

Does Penguin Finance have a token?

We found no token for the Solana Penguin Finance. Its blog, from the November 2021 introduction to the final review, announces no token launch or airdrop. Any listing of a "Penguin Finance" token on Solana is either the unrelated PEFI, the Pudgy Penguins token, or a copycat. Treat it with caution.

Who Penguin Finance is for today

Penguin Finance is not a usable product for new users. With no official app, there is nowhere to list a bond, buy one or stake.

The page is useful for three groups:

• people researching how protocol-owned liquidity was tried on Solana in 2021-2023;
• former users who need to know the app is gone and the domain has changed hands;
• traders who see "Penguin" in an aggregator route and want to know what that pool is.

Anyone still holding old Penguin LP, staking or Vtoken positions has no official interface to manage them.

Penguin Finance risks

The biggest risk is the domain. The png.fi domain is for sale, so a new owner could put up a look-alike site. Do not connect a wallet to anything at png.fi or app.png.fi.

There is also no team. No one has posted for nearly three years, so bugs will not be fixed and old positions will not be supported.

The swap program can still be upgraded, according to Solscan. Its upgrade authority (3M1gJoNCxuw6GBMRatHzCvxwbQMiUZ6VoG22UCjubQZq) is an off-curve address. That usually means a program-controlled account such as a multisig, rather than a single wallet key, but we could not confirm who controls it. The program was last deployed at slot 161,376,048, in late 2022.

We found no published audit for the swap, bond or distributor programs. Solscan does not list the swap program as a verified build.

Liquidity left in abandoned pools also tends to be thin, so trades routed through them can carry high price impact.

Penguin Finance history and metrics

• November 24-25, 2021: Penguin Finance introduced and launched on Solana.
• January 2022: first Penguin Bond, with BunnyDucky.
• March 2022: Penguin Distributor launched.
• April 2023: Penguin published its Neptune Bond Market overview and the Penguin x Parrot grant.
• May 2023: Wayne from Penguin Finance discussed bonding and Solana DeFi on the Cove podcast.
• November 25, 2023: second-anniversary review, the last post.

The second-anniversary review reported these lifetime totals:

• trading volume: over $14 million;
• total bonded value: over $502,000;
• distributors created: over 389,000.

The bonded value was small next to the swap volume. The bond market never drew much capital, even though the distributor tool saw heavy use.