Over Christmas, Pudgy Penguins hosted an animated show at the Las Vegas Sphere, displaying penguin characters on the facility’s outdoor screens.
In the post regarding XPudgy Penguins said the animations were broadcast on Christmas Eve outside the Las Vegas Sphere, a popular domed venue wrapped in high-definition LED panels designed to display large-scale visuals seen on the Las Vegas Strip.
Pudgy Penguins is an NFT project founded in 2021 and purchased in April 2022 by entrepreneur Luca Netz for $2.5 million in Ether (ETH). As NFT revenues declined, Netz leveraged his consumer products expertise to expand the project beyond digital collectibles and into the production of physical toys to generate cash flow.
“Toys generate significant revenue, but the margins are slim,” Netz said in an August interview with Cointelegraph. “We sell millions of dollars worth of toys today, but it took a while to develop this business.”
What began as a short-term effort to extend the company’s runway evolved into a core business line that allowed Pudgy Penguins to end the year with an estimated $50 million in revenue.
The company is also prioritizing Instagram to promote its brand. At the time of writing, the Pudgy Penguins account has approximately 2 million entourage.
Related: Polygon NFT transactions hit $2 billion sales milestone as network defies economic slowdown
2025 was a complex year for NFTs
The NFT market started 2025 under pressure, with a edged decline in sales activity. Transaction volume in the first quarter fell 63% year-over-year to $1.5 billion, compared to $4.1 billion in the same period in 2024.
The decline worsened in March, when monthly sales fell 76% to $373 million from $1.6 billion a year earlier, though a compact number of collections, including Pudgy Penguins, showed relative resilience.
Overall market valuations also declined by the end of the year. CoinGecko data showed that the total NFT market capitalization fell to around $2.5 billion in December, a 2025 low.
However, despite the overall market downturn, some NFT projects have managed to carve out a niche in this space. One area showing strength in 2025 is real-world NFTs backed by collectability, particularly trading cards, with platforms like Courtyard.io combining authenticated Pokémon cards with onchain tokens that can be traded or exchanged.
According to CryptoSlam, Courtyard processed over 230,000 transactions and generated approximately $13.9 million turnover in the last 30 days.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Courtyard CEO Nicolas le Jeune empathized with the importance of using blockchain as “a tool, not a destination.”
“The cards you buy on Courtyard are not worth more because they are NFTs. The value is the underlying asset – an NFT simply gives you a better way to experience that,” he said.
Warehouse: Sei wallets at Xiaomi, Bhutanese gold at Solana: Asia Express
