The Pudgy Penguins founders sold the project for $2.5 MILLION after the community voted them out and then watched it become a billion dollar brand without them It all started in December 2021 on a single Twitter Space The community manager ColdPizza got on the space in front of 3,000 listeners and quit on the spot after claiming co founder ColeThereum paid him 1 ETH to keep quiet about how the project was being run A month later a major holder named 9x9x9 went public with everything He owned 242 Pudgy Penguins, 540 Lil Pudgys and one rare banana penguin he paid 100 ETH for and he posted a thread saying the founders were draining the treasury and tried to dump the entire project on him for 888 ETH It got worse from there The founders first asked him to buy 20% of the project for 4,000 ETH worth almost $13 million and when he said no they dropped the price to 888 ETH for the whole thing The community lost patience long before that Promises of a game, a token and an NFT children's book went nowhere, the team was still "hiring" half a year in and their Christmas drop "Pudgy Rods" was so bad the community started calling them "Pudgy Rogs," a mix of rods and rugs Then it all came down ColeThereum tweeted he was "taking a break from Twitter" and a day later the Discord opened a vote on whether to remove him Holders voted him out the same day A few months later an LA entrepreneur named Luca Netz who already held Pudgy Penguins himself bought the whole project from the founding team for 750 ETH worth $2.5 million What happened next is the part that hurts Three years later Pudgy is doing $40M a year in revenue from toys, licensing and royalties 1.5M plush toys sold across Walmart, Target, Amazon, Walgreens and Chuck E. Cheese The PENGU airdrop in Dec 2024 was the largest in Solana history at $1.5B distributed PENGU sits at a $630M market cap today and Luca is targeting an IPO by 2027 The founders sold it for $2.5 million and watched the new owner turn it into one of the biggest NFT brands ever made