Pudgy Penguins ran an animated display at the Las Vegas Sphere during Christmas week, projecting penguin characters across the venue's exterior screens.
In a post to X, Pudgy Penguins said the animation was livestreamed outside the Las Vegas Sphere on Christmas Eve. The Las Vegas Sphere is a popular domed venue wrapped in high-definition LED panels designed to display large-scale visuals across the Las Vegas Strip.
sauce: stubby penguin
Pudgy Penguins is an NFT project founded in 2021 and acquired by entrepreneur Luca Netz in April 2022 for $2.5 million in Ether (ETH). As NFT revenues dwindled, Netz leveraged his consumer products background to expand the project beyond digital collectibles and into the production of physical toys to generate cash flow.
“Toys generate a lot of revenue, but the margins are thin,” Netz said in an August interview with Cointelegraph. “We currently sell millions of dollars worth of toys, but it took us a while to expand into that business.”
What started as a short-term effort to extend the company's runway has since evolved into a core business line, with Pudgy Penguins ending the year with an estimated $50 million in revenue.
The company is also prioritizing Instagram to promote its brand. As of this writing, the Pudgy Penguins account has approximately 2 million followers.
Pudsey Penguin's Instagram channel. sauce: stubby penguin
2025 was a difficult year for NFTs
The NFT market began under pressure in 2025, with sales activity plummeting. Trading volume in the first quarter was $1.5 billion, down 63% year over year from $4.1 billion in the same period in 2024.
Although the economic downturn deepened in March, with monthly sales down 76% to $373 million from $1.6 billion a year earlier, a few collections, such as Pudsey Penguins, showed relative resilience.
By the end of the year, overall market valuations had also declined. NFT market capitalization fell to about $2.5 billion in December, the lowest level in 2025, according to CoinGecko data.
However, despite the overall market downturn, some NFT projects have managed to carve a niche in this field. One area that will show strength in 2025 is NFTs backed by real-world collectibles, particularly trading cards, with platforms like Courtyard.io linking authenticated Pokemon cards to on-chain tokens that can be traded or redeemed.
A rare Pokemon card. sauce: Courtyard Io
According to CryptoSlam, Courtyard has processed more than 230,000 transactions and generated approximately $13.9 million in revenue in the past 30 days.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Courtyard CEO Nicolas Le Jeune echoed the importance of using blockchain as a “tool, not a destination.”
“The cards you buy at Courtyard don't have any more value just because they're NFTs. Value is the underlying asset. NFTs just provide a better way to experience it,” he said.
