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 mentioned its animations went dwell 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 challenge 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 increase the challenge past digital collectibles and into bodily toy manufacturing to generate money stream.
“Toys generate vital income, however the margins are skinny,” Netz instructed Cointelegraph in an August interview. “We’re promoting hundreds of thousands of {dollars}’ value of toys at present, 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 developed right into a core enterprise line, positioning Pudgy Penguins to finish the yr 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 troublesome yr for NFTs
The NFT market began 2025 underneath strain, with gross sales exercise falling sharply. First-quarter transaction volumes dropped 63% yr over yr 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 yr earlier, although a small variety of collections, together with Pudgy Penguins, confirmed relative resilience.
By year-end, general market valuations had additionally declined. CoinGecko knowledge confirmed the overall NFT market capitalization fell to about $2.5 billion in December, its lowest degree of 2025.
However regardless of the general market downturn, some NFT initiatives have managed to carve out a distinct segment within the area. One space exhibiting 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.
In keeping with 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 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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