Pudgy Penguins is one of the rare NFT collections that has actually grown in value and notoriety during the prolonged bear market, and it recently launched toys targeted at mainstream audiences. The brand has now released an exclusive “influencer box” of toys and collectibles available only via Walmart.com today for Cyber Monday.

The Pudgy Penguins White Celebrity Box, as described on the Walmart website, includes a 12-inch plush toy, an action figure, a smaller clip-on plush, an igloo toy, and a certificate that lets buyers claim a free NFT (minted on zkSync Era) for the Pudgy World gaming platform.

Walmart will sell the “influencer box bundle,” as Pudgy Penguins called it on Twitter, for Cyber Monday only for $25. It’s listed as half off the list price, which may reflect the combined price of the included items. The 12-inch plush toys, for example, typically sell for $20 to $25 apiece on their own.

Pudgy Penguins revealed its plush line in September in an alliance with Walmart, which saw the cartoonish toys stocked in more than 2,000 stores across the United States. Walmart U.S. VP Brittany Smith said in a press release at the time that the project is “bridging the gap between our physical and digital worlds of play for kids in a really engaging way.”

The original Ethereum profile picture (PFP) project launched in 2021 as the NFT craze was taking off, propelled in part by a prominent New York Times story about the collection. But by early 2022, with the community in disarray and collectors demanding a leadership change, the owners sold the IP to serial entrepreneur Luca Netz for $2.5 million.

Since then, Netz and team have grown the project profile substantially, building up a following of more than a million Instagram followers while launching toy lines and other products. Earlier this year, Pudgy Penguins raised $9 million in funding to fuel their expansion plans.

 NFT Revolution

Pudgy Penguins Bucked the NFT Crash—Now It’s Raised $9 Million

Pudgy Penguins, an Ethereum NFT project that surged amid the 2021 bull run and then toppled into chaos, was purchased by a serial entrepreneur about a year ago and given a second life—right as the market collapsed. But the cartoon birds have persevered, and now the team has raised funding as its ambitions grow. Today, Pudgy Penguins announced that it has raised $9 million in seed funding in a round led by early-stage investment firm 1kx, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, Kronos Researc...

Pudgy Penguins recently set an all-time high starting price of over $13,000 worth of ETH—more than seven times the value of the collectibles shortly before Netz took over in April 2022. It’s one of the only NFT projects that has grown substantially in USD value since the NFT market collapsed in May 2022.