Pudgy Penguins bring NFT characters to the Las Vegas sphere
Pudgy Penguins performed animation at the Las Vegas Globe during Christmas week, featuring the penguin characters on the venue's outdoor screens.
In a post on X, Pudgy Penguins said the animations went live on Christmas Eve on the exterior of the Las Vegas Globe, a famous dome equipped with high-resolution LED panels designed to project large-scale visuals of the Las Vegas Strip.
Pudgy Penguin is an NFT project founded in 2021 and acquired in April 2022 by entrepreneur Luca Netz for $2.5 million in Ether (ETH). As NFT's revenue declined, Netz, with its consumer products background, moved the project beyond digital collectibles and into physical toy production to generate cash flow.
“Toys generate high revenue, but the margins are thin,” Netz told Cointelegraph in an August interview. Today we are selling millions of dollars worth of toys, but it took time to break into that business.
What started out as a short-lived effort to extend the company's runway, Pudgy Penguin ended the year with an estimated $50 million in revenue, and turned into a mainstream business.
The company prioritized Instagram to promote its brand. As of this writing, the Pudgy Penguins account has nearly 2 million followers.
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2025 was a rough year for NFTs.
The NFT market started under pressure in 2025, the sales activity fell sharply. First-quarter trading volume fell 63 percent year over year to $1.5 billion, down from $4.1 billion in the same period in 2024.
The decline was exacerbated in March, when monthly sales fell 76 percent to $373 million from $1.6 billion a year earlier, although a small number of collections, including Pudgy Penguins, showed relative resilience.
By the end of the year, overall market prices were also down. According to CoinGecko data, the total NFT market capitalization fell to $2.5 billion in December, the lowest level since 2025.
But despite the overall market decline, some NFT projects have managed to carve out a niche in the space. In the year One area that will show strength in 2025 is real-world collectible-backed NFTs, specifically trading cards, where platforms like Courtyard.io can be traded or bought by linking verified Pokemon cards to onchain tokens.
According to CryptoSlam, the site has processed more than 230,000 transactions and generated sales of approximately $13.9 million in the past 30 days.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Gbdownload CEO Nicolas Le Jeune described the importance of using blockchain as a “tool, not an access.”
“The cards you buy on the deck are NFTs, so they don't have more value. The value is the main asset – an NFT gives you a better way to experience it,” he said.
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