Pudgy Penguins brings NFT characters to the Las Vegas Sphere during Christmas
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 put up on X, Pudgy Penguins stated its animations went stay on Christmas Eve on the outside of the Las Vegas Sphere, a well-liked domed venue wrapped in high-resolution LED panels designed to show large-scale visuals seen throughout the Las Vegas Strip.
Supply: Pudgy Penguins
Pudgy Penguins is an NFT undertaking 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 client merchandise background to broaden the undertaking past digital collectibles and into bodily toy manufacturing to generate money stream.
“Toys generate important income, however the margins are skinny,” Netz advised Cointelegraph in an August interview. “We’re promoting hundreds of thousands of {dollars}’ price of toys in the present day, but it surely 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.
Pudgy Penguins Instagram channel. Supply: Pudgy Penguins
2025 was a troublesome 12 months for NFTs
The NFT market began 2025 beneath 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 overall 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 displaying energy in 2025 is real-world collectible–backed NFTs, notably buying and selling playing cards, with platforms akin to Courtyard.io linking authenticated Pokémon playing cards to onchain tokens that may be traded or redeemed.
Uncommon Pokémon card. Supply: Courtyard.io
Based on 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 “software, not a vacation spot.”
“The playing cards you purchase on Courtyard aren’t price extra as a result of they’re NFTs. The worth is the underlying asset — the NFT simply offers you a greater strategy to expertise it,” he stated.
