Luca Schnetzler, known as Luca Netz, lived a reality that seems to belong to a parallel world.
There was no luxurious office. There were no millions in the account. There were no investors, headlines, or a global brand to command.
There was instability.
Luca grew up in a family that faced enormous financial difficulties and spent part of his childhood in a situation of housing vulnerability. He and his mother lived for years moving between different places, including rooms, couches, and temporary shelters, living a childhood below the poverty line.
Years later, that kid who had to learn to deal with lack of money too early would be at the front of one of the most unlikely stories in the universe of cryptocurrencies.
And perhaps the most curious thing is that Luca didn’t get there by following the traditional path.
He left school while still a teenager.
He started working at a distribution center.
He sold products online.
He discovered the power of social media before many people understood how to turn attention into money.
And by the age of 18, he had already claimed his first million dollars.
But this still wasn’t the most surprising part of the story.
The real leap would happen when he decided to bet everything he had on NFTs precisely at the time of the NFT crisis.
Luca Netz’s story starts far away from the glamour associated with the world of cryptocurrencies.
Created by a single, poor mother, Luca had a childhood marked by financial difficulties and instability. The need to earn money didn’t show up for him as a distant ambition of entrepreneurship.
It was a concrete need.
It was about surviving.
This difference helps explain much of the business personality he would develop later.
While other teenagers were focused on school and social life, Luca began looking for ways to generate income.
He ended up abandoning high school shortly after, and got a job as a logistics assistant packing boxes at Ring, a company known for its home security devices.
But the work didn’t awaken in him only the desire to receive a paycheck every month.
It sparked curiosity.
Luca began to observe how companies worked. How products were sold. How brands grew. How money came in and went out of a business.
He didn’t want to spend his life only executing tasks.
He wanted to understand the mechanism behind them.
And it was that curiosity that led him to the internet.
The first big turning point came when Luca entered e-commerce.
He realized something that would become fundamental to his entire career: you didn’t necessarily need a big brand to sell a lot. You needed to know where people’s attention was.
He started selling fake chains with a luxurious appearance online.
The product wasn’t gold. They were gold-plated or fake versions of pieces that, if made with real gold, would cost thousands of dollars.
But Luca found a different way to sell it.
Instead of spending fortunes trying to pay for ads, he looked for celebrity fan pages on Instagram, and his chains weren’t just any chains—they were replica costume jewelry used by those celebrities.
The logic was simple!
A page with dozens or hundreds of followers could charge a small amount to promote a product. If the post generated sales, you just had to repeat the process.
It was a kind of marketing lab.
Luca tested.
He watched.
He reinvested.
He scaled.
In his interview with Fortune, he said he even ended up paying fan pages connected to artists like Kendrick Lamar to promote his chains. Some campaigns cost only dozens of dollars and could generate thousands of sales.
The result was impressive.
In just nine months, according to Netz himself, the business had surpassed US$1 million in accumulated revenue.
All in all, more than 300,000 chains would have been sold before the company was later traded for about US$8 million.
Luca was only 18 years old.
And he had just discovered something that he would carry for the rest of his career:
Attention is an asset!
It would be easy to tell this story as if Luca had simply discovered a viral product and gotten rich.
But there’s a more interesting part.
Before NFTs, he scaled professionally with the advertising he got from the chain businesses and went through different businesses and roles.
Among them was a connection to Gel Blaster, a toy company that used small gel spheres as recreational ammunition. Luca became an investor in the brand and later took the position of CMO.
There, he learned a skill that would later be decisive.
How to take something that exists on the internet and put it into the physical world.
This experience would help explain one of the most important decisions of his career.
When everyone was looking at NFTs as digital images traded in crypto wallets, Luca began to see something else.
A brand!
In July 2021, a collection called Pudgy Penguins was launched on the Ethereum blockchain.
They were 8,888 digital penguin characters with different traits.
The collection sold out quickly. The project gained attention and created a passionate community.
But there was a problem.
The execution didn’t match the potential.
Promises weren’t delivered, the community started to lose trust, and the project got into an increasingly complicated situation. The community’s own historical documentation describes the period as a phase of strong dissatisfaction with the original team.
It was exactly at that moment that Luca entered the story.
He wasn’t some outsider watching from the sidelines.
He was someone who had bought a Pudgy Penguin NFT and started taking part in the community.
And he noticed something other investors might not have been able to see.
Behind the NFTs was intellectual property.
There were characters.
There was a community.
There was a recognizable aesthetic.
And, above all, there was a story that could be much bigger than the blockchain itself.
In April 2022, Luca acquired the brand’s rights with all his savings for approximately US$2.5 million, including intellectual property rights and assets related to the project.
For many people, that looked like an absurd bet—he didn’t have any choice; that business had to work.
The NFT market was about to face one of the toughest periods in its history—its collapse.
But Luca was looking at something else.
While the market was asking how much a JPEG was worth, he asked:
“What if this is a brand?”
A few months after the acquisition, the crypto market entered a deep pullback.
NFT prices plummeted.
Several projects disappeared.
Investors lost money.
The enthusiasm that had taken over the industry in 2021 began to evaporate.
It would be the perfect time to give up.
Luca did the opposite.
The strategy started to change.
Instead of relying exclusively on the appreciation of NFTs, Lucas began building a business around intellectual property.
And that meant doing something that seemed almost contradictory for a company born on the blockchain:
Take the penguins off the screen!
Pudgy Penguins began to take physical form.
Plush toys.
Toys.
Licensed products.
Characters that previously existed mainly in digital wallets began to show up on the shelves of major retailers.
Walmart.
Target.
Five Below.
The project was making a rare transition: it stopped being only an internet phenomenon and became a consumer brand in the real world.
The strategy also had another detail.
The toys didn’t need to completely abandon the technology that had given rise to the brand.
Physical products could work as an entry point into the digital universe.
This combination—traditional toy on one side, digital identity on the other—became one of the main bets of the business model Luca was once again creating.
In his interview with Forbes, he highlighted this transformation: after acquiring the Pudgy Penguins, Lucas Netz shifted the focus to physical toys, licensing, and media—helping the brand cross the so-called “crypto winter”.
The results started to show up in the numbers.
In 2023, the company recorded more than US$10 million in sales, and later reached more than 1 million toys sold in just one year.
What used to look like just a collection of penguin NFTs began to behave like a traditional intellectual property company.
But Luca still had another card up his sleeve.
If Pudgy Penguins had managed to turn digital characters into physical products, what remained was to create an even bigger bridge between the community, the brand culture, and the crypto market.
The token was launched on the Solana blockchain and distributed largely through an airdrop aimed at eligible participants in the ecosystem. The project’s own official page confirms the use of Ethereum and Solana wallets in the eligibility and claiming process.
Here there’s an important distinction.
$PENGU n should not be confused simply with “the value of Pudgy Penguins”.
It’s a separate crypto asset, associated with the ecosystem and community.
And, like any crypto asset, its price can experience big swings.
But strategically speaking, the launch represented something bigger.
The penguins were no longer just characters.
They started occupying different layers of the internet:
NFTs.
Memes.
Toys.
Social media.
Games.
Licensing.
Cryptocurrency.
This multiplicity is exactly what makes Luca’s story so interesting.
Maybe that’s the most important part of the whole journey.
Anyone who looks quickly at Pudgy Penguins might see only cute penguin drawings.
Luca saw intellectual property.
And intellectual property can travel.
It can turn into a toy.
It can turn into a cartoon character.
It can show up on clothes.
It can be licensed.
You can enter games.
It can turn into a meme.
You can occupy social media.
You can build a community.
It’s the same logic that made brands like Pokémon, Hello Kitty, and other cultural properties cross generations and formats.
The difference is that Pudgy Penguins were born at a time when the digital community itself could participate in building and distributing the brand.
In 2026, this expansion continues.
The company announced new initiatives in categories such as beauty and wellness, collectibles, and lifestyle, as well as partnerships with brands and organizations from different sectors. According to Pudgy Penguins itself, the brand has also already surpassed 100 billion views on GIPHY.
The little penguin stopped being just an NFT.
It turned into a language.
There’s a powerful irony in this story.
When Luca was a teenager, money meant security.
A house.
Stability.
The possibility of not depending on the next opportunity.
Years later, he would be running a company built on a completely different idea: turning attention and community into a global brand.
Luca’s net worth today is estimated at more than US$100 million.
But what really stands out in Luca’s life path isn’t only how much money he accumulated.
It’s the speed of transformation.
From a teenager living in extreme poverty and vulnerability to a multi-millionaire.
A warehouse worker…
For an e-commerce entrepreneur.
From an entrepreneur...
From a teenager to a millionaire at 18.
From a millionaire...
To an investor in a failed NFT collection.
And as an investor in a failed NFT collection...
For CEO of a brand that managed to cross the virtual world and reach the shelves of the biggest retail chains in the United States.
Maybe it’s tempting to look at Luca Netz and conclude that his story is simply about making money.
No!
The most interesting part is his ability to perceive value where others saw only something passing.
When fake chains were in fashion, he saw distribution.
When Instagram was full of fan pages, he saw cheap advertising.
When Gel Blaster was growing, he saw a product that could reach the mass market.
When Pudgy Penguins were in crisis, he saw intellectual property.
And when the market collapsed, he didn’t try to save just one NFT project.
He tried to build a brand.
That difference changed everything.
Because there’s a huge gap between buying something that’s going up and buying something you believe you can build.
Luca bet on the second option.
And maybe that’s why Pudgy Penguins’ story survived the NFT cycle itself.
The market can change.
Cryptocurrencies can fall.
NFTs can move out of the headlines.
Trends can disappear.
But characters that manage to win a community can endure.
Today, Luca Schnetzler is known as the man behind the transformation of Pudgy Penguins.
But reducing his story to the headline “CEO who became a millionaire with NFTs” would be missing exactly the most fascinating part.
The story started long before the blockchain.
It started with a kid who learned early that no one would come to solve his problems for him.
He continued with a teenager who dropped out of school and entered the job market.
He went through e-commerce, marketing, and toys.
And it reached a collection of 8,888 digital penguins that, at one point, seemed to have lost its way.
Luca bought it for about US$2.5 million.
The market called it madness.
He called it an opportunity.
And maybe that’s the best way to understand his whole journey.
Luca Netz didn’t become a multi-millionaire because he found a perfect opportunity.
He became multi-millionaire because he learned to look at imperfect opportunities and ask what they could become.
The Pudgy Penguins were just drawings.
Until someone saw the characters.
They were just NFTs.
Until someone saw intellectual property.
They were just a community.
Until someone saw a brand.
They were just penguins.
Until Luca decided to make them walk out of the blockchain.
And maybe that’s the part of the story that hasn’t ended yet.
Because if there’s one thing Luca Netz’s journey makes clear, it’s that the business was never just about selling penguins.
It was about finding out how far a penguin could go.
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