Pudgy Penguins hosted a lively display on the Las Vegas Sphere during Christmas week, projecting its penguin characters onto the venue’s outdoor screens.
In an article on XPudgy Penguins said its entertainment went live on Christmas Eve outside the Las Vegas Sphere, a popular domed venue wrapped in high-resolution LED panels designed to display large-scale visuals viewable on the Las Vegas Strip.
Pudgy Penguins is an NFT project founded in 2021 and acquired in April 2022 by an entrepreneur Luca Netz for $2.5 million in Ether (ETH). As NFT revenue declined, Netz leveraged its consumer products experience to expand the project beyond digital collectibles and into physical toy production to generate cash flow.
“Toys generate significant revenue, but the margins are thin,” Netz told Cointelegraph in an interview in August. “Today we sell toys worth millions of dollars, but it took time to develop this sector. »
What began as a short-term effort to expand the company’s runway has since become a core business, allowing Pudgy Penguins to finish the year with an estimated $50 million in revenue.
The company also prioritizes Instagram to promote its brand. At the time of writing, the Pudgy Penguins account has approximately 2 million followers.
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2025 was a tough year for NFTs
The NFT market started 2025 under pressure, with commercial activity down sharply. Transaction volumes in the first quarter fell 63% year-over-year to $1.5 billion, compared to $4.1 billion for the same period in 2024.
The slowdown intensified in March, when monthly sales plunged 76% 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 valuations had also declined. Data from CoinGecko showed that the total NFT market cap fell to around $2.5 billion in December, its lowest level in 2025.
But despite the general market slowdown, some NFT projects have managed to carve out a niche in space. One area showing strength in 2025 is real-world collectible NFTs, particularly trading cards, with platforms such as Courtyard.io linking authenticated Pokémon cards to on-chain tokens that can be traded or traded.
According to CryptoSlam, Courtyard has processed over 230,000 transactions and generated approximately $13.9 million in sales over the last 30 days.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Nicolas le Jeune, CEO of Courtyard, emphasized the importance of using blockchain as “a tool, not a destination.”
“The cards you buy on Courtyard aren’t worth more because they’re NFTs. The value is the underlying asset — the NFT just gives you a better way to experience it,” he said.
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