The Future of Pudgy Penguins: From Digital Collectibles to Global Mascot with Luca Netz at KBW2025

Hello. Hello. First and foremost, I just want to say I'm super excited to be here. Um, I've always loved Korea, but specifically on this trip, it's been uh it's been really eye opening. I knew a lot of things, but one thing I didn't know was how meaningful K culture and Korea is from a web two cultural perspective on the rest of the world.

So before I get started, I just want to say you guys should be very proud of your country. Uh it's unbelievable to say the least. But I'm Lucett. I'm the CEO of Igloo Inc. Igloo Inc.

holds two companies, Pudgy Penguins and Abstract Chain. Today I will go over with you guys what we do over at Pudgy Penguins, what we've done, and why I think the future is so exciting. So, first it's important to note what is Igloo Inc.? Igloo, Inc. is building web 3's first mainstream IP ecosystem and the infrastructure to support a new era of brand building and consumer participation on chain.

The one thing I think Igloo, Inc. does better than anyone else is I think we build digital brands better than anyone in the world. One thing that I'm really proud about is I think Pudgy Penguins is Web 3's first ever true mass market IP brand. These flightless birds are not only pioneering the future of consumer crypto, but we're disrupting the traditional IP model as well. So, what's our strategy and how have we basically gotten here?

Well, there's a couple things and we'll get into it in a sec, but one of the things I'm most proud about is actually our relationship with our holders and our community and the actual reinvention of IP and how IP is being built. And what I mean by this is really this graphic. On its face, this graphic seems pretty simple. But as you will soon find out, when you take a deep dive, you'll actually understand the implications of why I think this is not only transcendent for crypto, but transcendent for the traditional IP business. And so to understand this graphic, let's look at the left side.

Today, when you're looking at Pixar, Warner Brothers, San Rio, or Disney, they all have the same relationship. You have a brand, you have people who purchase from that brand, and the people who fall in love with those products become community members. It's a very transactional relationship. The relationship doesn't go much further than this. Uh, and it's basically how brands have been built for the last 100 200 years.

Now, one of the things that we did at Pudgy Penguins is try to reinvent this model. And so, on the top of the funnel, we do have the Pudgy Penguin brand. However, right below that, we have what I call participants. These participants to me are Pudgy Penguin NFT holders and Pangu token holders. And to me, this layer is the most interesting layer because it's basically the alignment, an early alignment of your early believers with the success of the brand.

I was talking to somebody uh when I first bought Pudgy Penguins about four years ago and he asked me, he said, "Luca, if you could own a piece of Mickey Mouse, would you?" And I said, "Yeah, I would." But unfortunately, Mickey Mouse was created in the 1900s and that ship has left the dock. In this case, however, every NFT holder and token holder owns a piece of what I think is Internet's Mickey Mouse, which is Pudgy Penguin's Pangu. Everybody can participate and include their ideas into the future of the brand and they are building the brand alongside us not just consuming the brand with us.

Another interesting part of this participation layer is actually on the NFT side. I don't know how many of you guys are familiar with what we do on the NFTs, but the Pudgy Penguins NFTs have been around for about four years. They have about 5,000 unique holders. And every time Pudgy Penguins makes a product, whether it's a toy or a collectible or a cookie or an ice cream or uh all the amazing things we've built over the last couple of years, every time we build one of those products, we go to our community members and say, "Hey, instead of drawing new penguins, we want to take your penguin and bring it to life. And every time we sell one of these penguins that we bring to life through one of these product collaborations, you will get a royalty in perpetuity.

And so the NFT collection is very much our first edition collectibles. It's our Charizard. It's our Pikachu. And the fact that all of these first editions are in the hands of our early believers and adopters, it now creates a new relationship where imagine if you owned a first edition Charizard and you had it for 20 years and all of a sudden your Charizard is now a new Pokemon product and you're now getting paid off of that. It's unheard of, but that's actually what's happening at Pudgy Penguins.

We've sold 3 million toys over the last couple of years. And every single time one of those toys sells, a royalty gets paid out to that holder in perpetuity. On its face, it seems menial, but this is a total reinvention of the IP business. And as we communicate this story uh through, you know, the different content mediums and educate our community on this, I believe that all of the super fans of One Piece and Pokemon and Hello Kitty and all the top IPs will ask themselves, I can go and be a fan of Pokemon, for example, but if I'm a fan of Pudgy Penguins, there seems to be a lot more upside for me financially than there is if I were to just continue loving and spending my money on Pokémon. And that I think is a really interesting innovation that again seems simple on its face, but if you actually peel back the layers, changes the entire dynamic of how IP's been built for the last uh you know 100 200 years.

So after you have the participants, you have the community uh and then from the community you have the consumers and then the last part about this which is also innovative is the builders, right? There's Pudgy Penguin holders who have built toys that are competing with the Pudgy Penguin brand toys and that they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on. And I don't mind. I'm actually in the business of proliferating the penguin. You guys will probably hear me say this across the presentation, but I believe impressions and eyeballs trump all.

And I'm a little less concerned about how much money the Pudgy Penguin brand and business makes and more concerned about how popular the Penguin is in web 3 and web 2 culture. But this is how I think Pudgy Penguins is a lot different than not only every other web 3 brand but also every other web 2 brand. How this relationship kind of works. This is kind of a little bit of a breakdown on the top of the funnel. You have the IP, the story, the content, the physical products.

Below that you have the NFT and token holders who are sharing their IP and participating in the growth and the creation of the of the brand. Then you have the community members who are amplifying and sharing this and and and and making sure the message gets out as to what we're doing. The consumers are then consuming the products and the builders are then building on top of that consumption layer. Um you know another breakdown of this and and this actually I think entails the whole uh Igloo Inc. ecosystem is you have the IP growth, you have the impressions, you have the Pangu and the GIFs and the Instagram and the Tik Tok.

Then you have the community and then as the community gets bigger, we license more products, we sell more products. As we sell more products, we onboard more people into web 3. As we onboard more people into web 3, they become NFT collectors and token holders. And as they become NFT collectors and token holders, we have huge web 3 brand success. Then new people want to then go follow what Pudgy Penguins is doing.

And when they do that, they do that on our blockchain, which is called abstract. Um, which I don't know how to go back, but that's the funnel. Uh, this is actually a tech product we made to make licensing easy. So in this whole funnel of hey if I have 50 new SKs going out with Walmart or maybe I'm collaborating with Lay or Line Friends, we will basically go to Overpass which is our licensing marketplace. Make a deal and basically tell our holders, hey we have a deal with Lay to go do a collectible.

We want your NFT. We want your token in this product with us. Uh they will license it, they will submit it, we will license it all with a click of a button. So, Overpass was super innovative in actually making sure this flow works seamlessly. Um, over the last couple of years, I think Pudgy Penguins has led in a couple different verticals, but I think the five verticals we've had seen the most success on are probably the five listed here.

Uh, no other web 3 company, and to be frank, very few web 2 companies have dominated social media like we have. You guys will see this in a sec, but Pudgy Penguins is getting about a billion impressions every single day ac across its stickers, its content, uh, across all different social networks. And you guys will see that in a sec. Toys and collectibles. I don't know how familiar you guys are, but it's paid to support Pudgy Penguins these last couple of years.

Basically, every single product we've ever sold is going for 2, three, four, five, 10x on the secondary market. Uh, not only the NFTts have appreciated significantly, the tokens done super well, but we've sold collectibles for $200 that are now reselling on eBay for $5,000, $6,000, and it's happening every day. It's not just a one-off situation. When you look at our gifts and memes, I actually really deeply appreciate speaking about this in a country like Korea because I know you guys understand the significance of stickers. Uh Line and Cacao are two of one of you know two of the top five 10 businesses in the country.

Uh they have prided themselves on stickers. Uh they make I think about a billion dollars each every year on their sticker sales. And I will tell you an interesting fact. Pudgy Penguins Pangu is the biggest western sticker company in the world by far. In 12 months we will be the biggest sticker company in the west of all time.

And you guys will see that data in a sec. But we are the premier gy sticker company in America and the greater western hemisphere. And then obviously in a in a world where NFTs haven't done so well in the last couple of years, we've defied the tide. Not only has the NFT performed, I tell people this all the time, but if you have ETH and you're staking it, stake your ETH and Pudgy Penguins. You will perform a lot better.

Uh, but not only has the NFT done super well and kind of gone against the tides, uh, Pudgy Penguins, I've been proud to say over the last three and a half years have gotten over 20 airdrops yielding each, uh, NFT holder north of $200,000 at today's prices. So, I'm really proud of that. And then, obviously, our content. We have a, you know, a Little Pudgies TV show on YouTube. And one of the things you'll see here in a sec, but uh we are working on potentially a movie and a TV show to go on streaming networks, which we'll talk about here.

This is a little bit of our Instagram growth. I won't harp on that too much. Um if you don't follow us on Instagram, I highly recommend that you do. This is the metric that really matters. This is just on Gy.

This is not including Tenor and Line and Canc Wechathat and Telegram and all the other places. Uh but on Gy alone, we have a 100red billion views uh on our gifts. And this again goes to uh what I was talking about just a second ago. Elon Musk says something that I think you guys will appreciate and I'll just reiterate it here because I have actually a quote retweet on what Elon Musk said, but Elon Musk said, "The person who controls the memes controls the world." And Luca says, "The person who controls the gifts controls the memes who controls the world."

In a world where there's a bunch of different meme coins, I would actually argue Pudgy Penguins Pangu is the only true net new memecoin of the last three or four years. I don't say this to disregard maybe your potential memecoin or your holdings. I respect everyone who's building in crypto, but let's be honest, none of these memes are actually memes and they have no data to support that they are transcendent, culturally relevant meme. Pudgy Penguins Pangu has all the data and you're looking at it right here that we are this cycle's meme. We are this generation's meme and we are the internet cultures preferred meme and the data supports that statement.

Uh you know we've seen huge success uh also in our physical products. When we launched our toys we were number one on Amazon across all categories uh which then segueed us into uh being in Walmart. So, for those who are not familiar, Walmart's the biggest retailer in the world, and Pudgy Penguin sits basically front and center of the store uh with uh with our toys and our products. One thing that I really pride myself on, and it's really not my doing, is actually the Pang Pow Mafia. Pudgy Penguins is successful because of the IP and because of, I think, what the team has done, but to be frank, we really have succeeded because of the community.

One lens that I want you guys to look at this graphic through is actually what it means to be an internet community and the implications of that. An analogy I like to use is actually the one of the cafeteria table. Hopefully everybody here participated in middle school and high school. And if you did, you understood that when you got your lunch and you were maneuvering through the cafeteria, all of us, and unfortunately not myself, wanted to be at the cool kids table. The cool kids table either consisted of the football team or the pretty girls or the smart people.

Whatever the cool kids table was to you, it it it included a group of people that you wanted to be a part of in this world of internet communities. I always tell the community that they're really important to this equation because if Pudgy Penguin's community was full of a bunch of losers crying all the time about how they wish they were doing something or complaining, no one would want to be a part of our table. Nobody would want to be a part of our community. But the beauty about Pudgy Penguins and our community is I think we have the best community in crypto. And why?

I think it's largely in part because of the pang pal mafia. There is not an executive team in crypto, whether it's your favorite DeFi product or centralized exchange or market maker or liquid fund or media or influencer or KO that isn't Pudgy Penguin aligned. Everybody across every organization somewhere in leadership has a Pudgy Penguin holder, whether it's an NFT or a token holder. And that makes us the cool kids table. That makes us the premier place in the crypto cafeteria that everyone wants to be a part of.

If you're building a community, this is the most important thing. You have to have a community that people want to join. When you join and you're a part of the Pudgy Penguins family and when you join the huddle, you're joining a cohort of the smartest, most affluent, most successful people in the industry. Uh, Pudgy Toys. So, you know, I mentioned we had sold about 3 million toys up until this point.

For those of you who are not familiar, Pudgy Penguins is in 10,000 retailers around the world. Walmart, Target, uh, Five Below, GameStop, the list is pretty endless. But one of the beauties, or at least the two beauties about the Pudgy Toys are really as follows. U, the first one is Pudgy Toys. Uh, every toy that we sell, like I had mentioned, is a NFT that was licensed from the community member in which everybody that is has their toy on shelf gets a royalty in perpetuity.

That's special. But the second part is every toy that we sell actually comes with a QR code. When you buy a Pudgy toy at a Walmart, at a Target, uh, at a low convenience store or a donkey, you get a QR code. And when you scan that QR code, you go through a flow. You're given a custody wallet through a custody wallet solution.

You're then asked to redeem NFTts through a gas experience. And within 60 seconds, you're basically onchain. And so an oblivious person who just wants to buy this cute penguin uh on the shelf is now an onchain abstract chain user through the sale of the toy. So the toys are not just, oh my god, Pudgy Penguins is selling toys. No, we're bringing community IP and bringing blockchain technology uh to the hands of everyday people.

Um which kind of explained here we mentioned that um IP and community growth at scale. You know at its core the business that is Pudgy Penguins is a licensing business. Uh we have some of the best licensing partners in the world. WME uh has been absolutely phenomenal to work with. Retail Monster is the great retail licensing partner in the world.

uh and negot uh so Pudgy Penguins I think is really serving two focuses and two purposes. The first one is Pudgy Penguins wants to be the face of penguins around the world. We want to be what uh Hello Kitty is to cats. Pudgy Penguins will be for penguins. And on the other side of it, I also think we're building crypto's mascot.

When I look at why has Pudgy Penguins and Pangu been so successful in crypto, it's because it's clear. We are crypto's most popular cryptonnative IP. We are crypto's most popular cryptonative brand. We are crypto's most universal and beloved character. Uh, and everyone has wanted to be a part of that over the last couple of years.

But though Pudgy Penguins is the fastest growing and biggest brand in crypto, the real question we have to ask ourselves is how do we become the fastest growing brand in the world and this generation's cultural phenomenon? I have a couple answers for that. I think Pudgy Penguins has to do a movie. Maybe we'll announce that today or maybe we won't, but probably won't. Uh, we have to have a movie.

We have to have a TV show. We have to have video games. We have one that just released which is Pudgy Party. I think today it crossed a million downloads in about 2 and 1/2 weeks. And if you haven't played Pudgy Party, I highly recommend you guys should.

I think it's the best crypto game ever made. Uh, from a functionality and experience perspective, I think anyone who spends 30 minutes on Pudgy Party, which is on your Google Play Store and Apple App Store right now, I think you will come to the same conclusion. And I try to be pragmatic and honest with myself. We need to collab with the biggest brands in the world. How do we put Pudgy Penguins in the world's biggest brands and on the shelves of their retail locations?

We need to absolutely win events and trade shows. One thing I'm really proud about is I don't think there's a crypto event that you can go to around the world in which Pudgy Penguins does not have an event. All of you guys are always invited. So, I really encourage you guys to show up to a Pudgy Penguin event. And then scaling our social content, which is one of the things that I think we do best.

Um, Pudgy World is kind of our version of Club Penguin. I don't know if anybody here has played Club Penguin before, but Club Penguin was actually the world's first metaverse. Uh, I believe we are going to build this generation's next Club Penguin. And I hope that you guys see this before the year is over. Uh, where are we going from a product perspective?

We need to go on popsicles. We need to go on ice cream. We need to go on blind boxes. We need more goods and apparel collaborations. The Pudgy Penguin book is actually releasing in Barnes & Noble this year.

So, if you're in uh if you see your local Barnes & Noble or Books a Million, please go and give it a shot. Uh and uh we need to scale high-end collectibles. My last point to this, cuz I don't have too much time, but we realize that Asia is the epicenter of cute and Pudgy Penguins is the number one cute IP in crypto and one of the biggest cute new IP brands in the world. And so our number one focus as a company and as a brand is to take over and to grow the company in Asia. Uh Pudgy Penguins had two really amazing collaborations in Korea.

Again, we deeply value Korea and Korean culture. Lay has been an absolutely amazing partner. For those of you who have not seen that collectible drop, I highly recommend you do. We have another partnership with a company called Line Friends, which I know most of you guys are familiar with. So hopefully you see some Pangu products at your local line store.

And we have a really big collaboration coming with another brand here shortly. Uh, one thing that I just wanted to sum up as I end my presentation here, no other brand in crypto, no other character in crypto comes close to the mind share of Pudgy Penguins and Pangu over the course of the last three and a half years. We've garnered 230 billion impressions. One thing that I've really prided myself on is actually the statistics behind Pangu. We're one of the biggest onchain tokens in the world.

I'm proud to say that we've burned over 13.7% of the Pangu supply in the last 8 months. Pangu's purpose is to be the biggest meme coin in the world. I do think we will eventually beat Doge and we will tell a deflationary story year overyear in a way that our competitors are not. Pangu is integrated in over 7,000 Shopify stores around the world and you can actually buy things on Luwanza uh with your Pangu.

So if you ever take a Luwanza fite uh get your Pangu wallet out and buy some pretzels and some sodas because you can do that. Uh the last thing is is uh Pangu today I believe is the face of crypto. I believe it's the mascot of crypto for all of the examples that I said above. Uh, one thing that I think Pangu will become is the face of finance. I don't know how familiar you guys are, but Pudgy Penguins Pangu uh, recently filed for an ETF that was picked up by the CBOE.

Uh, Pangu was the face of the VANC ETF V commercial a couple months back. It was also featured in the Bitwise uh, institutional uh, commercial for their ETFs as well and was recently mentioned in the quarter three bullish earnings report. Long story short, Pudgy Penguins is the face of penguins around the world. We are the face of crypto around the world. And pretty shortly, we will be the face of finance around the world.

Thank you guys for your time and I hope you guys have a great rest of your day.

Thank you. Everything's Luca.