Luca Netz on building Pudgy Penguins into the internet's Mickey Mouse — $40M revenue, toys in 10,000 retailers

Summary

Luca Netz bought Pudgy Penguins for $2.5 million in April 2022, roughly three years ago, after watching the project deteriorate under its original founders — a group of 18-year-olds with no operational experience. At the time, the three premier NFT collections were Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, and Pudgy Penguins. Apes became a $4 billion business, Punks held a multi-billion dollar market cap, and Penguins faded. Netz, then CMO and co-founder of Gel Blaster — which he describes as North America's fastest-growing toy business — saw undervalued IP and stepped in.

The thesis he's executing is simple: build Pudgy Penguins the way Hasbro, Mattel, or Disney would, but make it crypto-native. Toys are now in 10,000 retailers, each tied to an NFT and crypto experience. The business will do $40 million in revenue this year, raised on just a $9 million seed round with no outside capital since. Netz says his next ten closest competitors have raised nine figures, from venture or community treasuries, and have largely underperformed. He values the total Pudgy Penguin ecosystem at north of $2 billion and describes the broader EBITDA-implied valuation at $300–350 million — though he presents those figures conversationally rather than as audited disclosures.

The crypto-consumer bridge

Pudgy Penguins' Instagram has 1.8 million followers and almost never mentions crypto. That's deliberate. Netz argues that trying to immediately convert a mainstream consumer into a crypto buyer is a mistake — crypto is still taboo for most people, and hard selling it kills the funnel. Instead, the strategy is to build love and affinity around the character first, let people become fans, and let them discover the crypto layer themselves.

The less obvious part of the strategy is that the primary target isn't the mainstream consumer converting into a crypto buyer. It's the crypto whale whose family member stumbles onto a Pudgy Penguin at Walmart. That moment — when a crypto-native person sees their relative engaging with the IP organically — validates the thesis to exactly the audience most likely to deepen their financial commitment to the ecosystem.

Netz argues the next generation of crypto users, the 16-to-20-year-olds he's been meeting who are already making $20–30 million trading on Solana, will be fully crypto-native in a way that older users aren't. That cohort is his long-term audience.

Ethereum vs. Solana

The original Pudgy Penguins NFTs sit on Ethereum. The Pudgy token launched on Solana. Netz frames them as serving different functions rather than competing directly. Ethereum's mission, in his view, is to be a decentralized network state — important infrastructure for a world shaped by AI and centralized power. Solana he describes as a Silicon Valley-style organization built to win: low latency, aggressive business development, fast onboarding. For a consumer token that Instagram followers need to buy in seconds, Solana's user experience is currently the better fit. Even modest Ethereum gas fees are enough friction to kill the conversion.

The broader ambition is to own the penguin as a cultural symbol globally — becoming, as Netz puts it repeatedly, "the internet's Mickey Mouse." Whether that framing holds is an open question, but the underlying commercial progress is concrete: $40 million in revenue, 10,000 retail doors, and a $9 million raise that has funded the whole run.