Pudgy Penguins ran an animated show on the Las Vegas Sphere throughout Christmas week, projecting its penguin characters throughout the venue’s exterior screens.
In a submit on X, Pudgy Penguins mentioned its animations went reside on Christmas Eve on the outside of the Las Vegas Sphere, a preferred domed venue wrapped in high-resolution LED panels designed to show large-scale visuals seen throughout the Las Vegas Strip.
Pudgy Penguins is an NFT venture based in 2021 and purchased in April 2022 by entrepreneur Luca Netz for $2.5 million in Ether (ETH). As NFT income declined, Netz drew on his shopper merchandise background to develop the venture past digital collectibles and into bodily toy manufacturing to generate money stream.
“Toys generate important income, however the margins are skinny,” Netz informed Cointelegraph in an August interview. “We’re promoting tens of millions of {dollars}’ value of toys right now, nevertheless it took time to scale into that enterprise.”
What started as a short-term effort to increase the corporate’s runway has since advanced right into a core enterprise line, positioning Pudgy Penguins to finish the 12 months with an estimated $50 million in income.
The corporate additionally prioritizes Instagram to advertise its model. On the time of writing, the Pudgy Penguins account has round 2 million followers.
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2025 was a tough 12 months for NFTs
The NFT market began 2025 underneath strain, with gross sales exercise falling sharply. First-quarter transaction volumes dropped 63% 12 months over 12 months to $1.5 billion, down from $4.1 billion in the identical interval of 2024.
The downturn intensified in March, when month-to-month gross sales plunged 76% to $373 million from $1.6 billion a 12 months earlier, although a small variety of collections, together with Pudgy Penguins, confirmed relative resilience.
By year-end, total market valuations had additionally declined. CoinGecko information confirmed the entire NFT market capitalization fell to about $2.5 billion in December, its lowest stage of 2025.
However regardless of the general market downturn, some NFT tasks have managed to carve out a distinct segment within the house. One space exhibiting energy in 2025 is real-world collectible–backed NFTs, notably buying and selling playing cards, with platforms equivalent to Courtyard.io linking authenticated Pokémon playing cards to onchain tokens that may be traded or redeemed.
In response to CryptoSlam, Courtyard has processed greater than 230,000 transactions and generated roughly $13.9 million in gross sales over the previous 30 days.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Courtyard CEO Nicolas le Jeune empathized the significance of utilizing the blockchain as a “instrument, not a vacation spot.”
“The playing cards you purchase on Courtyard aren’t value extra as a result of they’re NFTs. The worth is the underlying asset — the NFT simply offers you a greater option to expertise it,” he mentioned.
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