Pudgy Penguins is projected to generate $50 million in revenue by 2025, marking a significant turnaround from its near-bankruptcy in 2022.
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Pudgy Penguins expanded into the toy industry, leveraging its NFT brand to drive revenue.
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Pudgy Penguins’ CEO, Luca Netz, made a $2.5 million acquisition to revitalize the brand.
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Despite a declining NFT market, Pudgy Penguins has seen its floor price rise significantly.
Pudgy Penguins is set to achieve $50 million in revenue by 2025, showcasing resilience in the NFT market. Discover how they turned their fortunes around!
| Year | Projected Revenue | Floor Price (ETH) |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $50 million | 15+ |
What is Pudgy Penguins?
Pudgy Penguins is an NFT brand that has successfully transitioned into the toy industry, projected to generate $50 million in revenue by 2025. This NFT project has leveraged its brand to thrive despite market challenges.
How did Pudgy Penguins recover from near bankruptcy?
CEO Luca Netz acquired the brand for $2.5 million in Ether during a market downturn, pivoting to physical toys to sustain the business. This strategic move has proven successful, allowing Pudgy Penguins to grow significantly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What challenges did Pudgy Penguins face?
Pudgy Penguins faced severe financial difficulties in 2022, risking bankruptcy due to declining NFT values.
Why is Pudgy Penguins popular on social media?
Pudgy Penguins has effectively utilized Instagram to build a strong community, engaging over 1.9 million followers.
Key Takeaways
- Pudgy Penguins’ pivot to toys: This strategic move has led to a projected $50 million revenue.
- Strong social media presence: With millions of followers, Pudgy Penguins effectively engages its community.
- Resilience in a challenging market: The brand has thrived despite the NFT market’s downturn.
Conclusion
Pudgy Penguins exemplifies how a brand can adapt and thrive in challenging conditions. By expanding into the toy industry and leveraging social media, it has positioned itself for future success in both the NFT and physical product markets.
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Pudgy Penguins has transformed from a struggling NFT brand to a projected $50 million revenue powerhouse by expanding into the toy industry.
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Just about three years ago, non-fungible token (NFT) brand Pudgy Penguins was nearing bankruptcy — now it’s projected to end the year with $50 million in revenue.
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CEO and owner Luca Schnetzler (better known as Luca Netz) built a fortune through Instagram before breaking into the toy industry. In the blockchain world, he was among the largest Pudgy Penguins holders, but like many in the community, he wasn’t happy with the collection’s price performance. In April 2022, the project was at an all-time low. He decided to strike, acquiring parent firm Igloo for $2.5 million in Ether (ETH).
Pudgy Penguins is set to achieve $50 million in revenue by 2025, showcasing resilience in the NFT market. Discover how they turned their fortunes around!
Pudgy Penguins thrived throughout the bear market as its floor price climbed from under 1 ETH to over 15 ETH today. Source: CoinGecko
Pudgy Penguins is Netz’s next Instagram hit amid NFT struggles
Netz has told his story countless times. His family struggled to find stability during his childhood. He moved frequently, which made high school frustrating and eventually pushed him to seek opportunities outside of school.
According to Netz, he made his first million at the age of 18 through a drop-shipping business on Shopify, selling jewelry he promoted through Instagram fan pages of popular hip hop artists. He went on to become the chief marketing officer of Gel Blaster, a toy gun that shoots water gel pellets sold in big-box stores such as Walmart.
When NFT revenues and the larger blockchain ecosystem spiraled, Netz relied on his consumer products background to expand Pudgy Penguins into a physical toy brand.
Netz announced in May 2024 that Pudgy Penguins sold its millionth toy in a year. Source: Luca Netz
At the time, it was just enough to keep the company afloat on the finance side, but it was also growing into a broader cultural brand.
“Toys are a high-revenue but low-profit-margin business. Today, we make millions of dollars selling toys, but we scaled into it,” Netz said.
“At the time, we needed it to pay the bill and sustain the company without having to either shut down or ask the community for money.”
Most cryptocurrency projects build communities on social media platforms familiar to the industry, such as X, Discord and Telegram. Instagram, a platform known for visuals, is often deprioritized by crypto projects. To Netz, this didn’t “make any sense.” Pudgy Penguins is on the typical crypto social channels as well, but Netz has placed a greater focus on Instagram than most other projects.
“When I go to Walmart or Target, [they don’t care about] the big crypto numbers like NFT market cap, price or volume,” he said. “The thing that really moved the needle with traditional brands in terms of getting big-box distribution is social media.”
As of Monday, Pudgy Penguins had 1.9 million followers on Instagram and 728,100 on X.
Pudgy Penguins’ Instagram posts regular reels telling the story of two animated penguins. Source: Pudgy Penguins
Pudgy Penguins shine as collectibles breathe life into NFTs
It has a social media brand and a toy line, but at its core, Pudgy Penguins is an NFT project. The NFT market has been declared dead by multiple media outlets on several occasions. According to DappRadar, NFT trading volume continued to fall even after its supposed death to under $1 billion in the second quarter of 2025.
NFT sales continued dropping in the second quarter but saw a rebound in sales count. Source: DappRadar
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), for example, captured the backing of global celebrities and public figures during its peak as it rose to a peak floor price of 153 ETH in May 2022, days before the Terra crash. The collection has fallen to a 13.44-ETH floor price.
CryptoPunks is today’s top NFT collection when measured by market capitalization, with a floor price of 52.97 ETH. It reached an all-time high of 125 ETH on Aug. 29, 2021, then reached 124 ETH on Oct. 18 of that year, just weeks before the FTX fiasco.
Pudgy Penguins now ranks higher than BAYC. Source: CoinGecko
But recently, excitement for NFTs is climbing back up, with collections like CryptoPunks and Moonbirds recording sales and trading spikes.
This comes along with the rise in collectibles’ popularity. Online resale platform eBay, in its Q2 earnings call, reported a 6% revenue bump to $2.7 billion, attributing its success to rising interest in collectibles, such as Pokémon cards.
“Pokémon is hot right now. You can buy a Pokémon card one week, and then two weeks later, it’s worth double. It’s insane,” Netz said.
“That’s a good signal to me that people are starting to kind of explore in collectibles again. When physical collectibles do well, digital collectibles follow.”
The Labubu frenzy has similarly caught the world by storm. These cute and creepy creatures have become collectible fashion accessories, made special with mystery packaging (blind boxes) to entice repeat purchases. One rare Labubu was reportedly sold for $10,500 on eBay.
Digital collectibles are following. Courtyard, a blockchain platform where users can access tokenized physical collectibles, is among the top NFT projects this year. It includes a vending machine feature where users can purchase booster packs, such as Pokémon and sports cards, for random draws and have a chance to hit gold, much like Labubu’s mystery boxes.
Courtyard’s performance ranks it among the top NFT projects. Source: CryptoSlam
“Out of the last four years, this is the most promising,” Netz said about the NFT market momentum. “My take is, when retail comes in, there’s nothing more fun in crypto than minting and collecting NFTs. I’ll always believe that,” he added.
Pudgy Penguins wants to be crypto’s mascot beyond NFTs
Pudgy Penguins intends to become the mascot for crypto. It launched a Solana-based memecoin, Pengu, in December 2024, distributed via a $1.5-billion airdrop.
Its token cratered in price in the first weeks after launch but has since recovered, backed by momentum from the greater Pudgy Penguins brand, NFTs and even an exchange-traded fund (ETF) application by Canary. Netz sees Pudgy Penguins expanding as a franchise throughout the crypto ecosystem.
“Arches; penguins,” Netz said, drawing inspiration from “The Founder,” a biographical film based on Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, while describing a future with Pudgy Penguins assets in ETFs and treasuries of companies.
The NFT market is still far from its 2021 peak, and past bursts of enthusiasm have faded quickly. Meanwhile, digital collectibles with physical counterparts are rising as one of the few segments showing consistent growth in an otherwise stagnant NFT market.
The Pudgy Penguins toy line and social reach have kept the brand alive where most NFT projects have faded, but the market it grew from is still fragile. For Netz, the bet is that building a cultural brand will outlast the blockchain cycles that nearly killed it.
“That ended up working in our favor because, while everything else was blowing up and projects in crypto were taking their communities for millions, we built the brand the right way when nobody else was doing it,” Netz said.
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