Luca Netz: Powering Pudgy Penguins

A lot of shine has gone off the last NFT boom, with millions of dollars lost on worthless pieces of digital art.

But a small number of projects have retained their value and cultural appeal.

Pudgy Penguins is one.

The collection of 8,888 penguin NFT profile pictures recently hit a new all-time-high price at about 22 ETH, having risen about 40% in a week.

Other durable projects like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks have seen similar jumps in line with the rise in bitcoin’s price. Now, with the crypto market rising again, Pudgy looks well placed. Its CEO Luca Netz recently announced it will launch its own PENGU token on Solana in 2025. About a quarter of the tokens will be reserved for the project’s NFT holders, with other tokens reserved for Solana and Ethereum users.

The success of Pudgy is testament to the work of Netz, who acquired the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection in April 2022, following a bidding war with Web3 influencer BeanieMaxi and others. Netz has kept the brand relevant, selling 1.5 million plush toys at Walmart and Target.

Pudgy has a devoted online fanbase, with 2 million followers on Instagram, 520,000 followers on TikTok and 205,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter). Videos of Penguin characters have registered 32 billion views on Giphy.

Pudgy was the second biggest NFT project of the last cycle and Netz expects the good times to return now.

“We’re here in a bull market,” he said. “That’s exciting. That changes things. I think we’ll see the craziness like we’ve seen before.” CoinDesk teamed up with the Pudgy Penguins team to illustrate this year’s Most Influential list. Netz says he hopes Pudgy is the type of brand that’s for everyone in crypto. “Penguins want to be the mascot of crypto. We want to represent the whole space,” he said.