Maurits says he paid around $90,000 PER HOUR for a private Boeing jet from Monaco to Ibiza, just to prove from flying economy his entire life to suddenly flying on one of the most expensive private jets in the world. Maurits: “I flew in a private jet before I’d ever flown business class. I’d fly in economy, and then I flew my first ever private jet. It was a BBJ Boeing jet.” “We flew from Monaco to Ibiza with friends, and those jets are, like, $90,000 an hour in terms of, like, so it’s, like, the top of the top.” Maurits: “It went so quickly from economy, economy, like I’ve gone my whole life, to then private jet, like top of the top of the top stuff.”

The story of one of the biggest crypto founders, Luca Netz, and how he built one of the biggest brands in crypto. - grew up homeless. - bounced between 30+ couches and guest rooms. - dropped out of high school at 16. – then got a job packing boxes at Ring, joining the company before it was acquired by Amazon for $1B+. by 18, Luca says he had made his first $1M selling chains online. 2017: crypto begins. – his brother installs Coinbase. – Luca gets curious. – instead of buying crypto, he spends money on stacks of 1080 Ti GPUs and starts mining. – mined DigiByte and Zcash. – according to Luca, he was mining “all the wrong things.” years later, he bought Zcash again. – he now says it could become his biggest trade ever. then came the NFT crash. Pudgy Penguins was on life support. – the original founders were pushed out by the community. while most people saw a dying JPEG project, Luca saw something nobody else was pricing correctly. – he bought Pudgy Penguins and its IP for roughly $2.5M–$3.5M. Luca says he believed Pudgy already had something extremely rare: a brand people actually cared about. then he went to work. – turned 10,000 JPEGs into a consumer brand – pushed Pudgy products into Walmart, Amazon and other major retailers – Pudgy toys eventually sold 1M+ units – built Igloo Inc. – launched Abstract, a consumer-focused blockchain – expanded Pudgy Penguins far beyond NFTs then came solana:2zMMhcVQEXDtdE6vsFS7S7D5oUodfJHE8vd1gnBouauv. December 2024. – Pudgy Penguins launched its token – distributed one of the biggest crypto airdrops of the year, with the token reaching an initial valuation of roughly $1.5B – thousands of people were rewarded Today, Luca says: «“I always believed my life was gonna look good.”»

Pudgy Penguins founder Luca Netz explains why solana:2zMMhcVQEXDtdE6vsFS7S7D5oUodfJHE8vd1gnBouauv launched on Solana while the NFTs remain on Ethereum. Luca: “Ethereum is going to be around a thousand years from now. When you’re thinking about a first edition collectible, it’s a great product, a great chain to have your first edition collectibles on.” “Solana is a mass market retail product. When you look at the token that is Pengu and how it acts within the mass-market ecosystem, Solana was the best place for it.” “I go where I think we can serve the audience and the people best.”

“I first got into crypto through my brother in 2017, when we downloaded Coinbase and started playing around with crypto.” Luca Netz, founder of Pudgy Penguins, reveals how his first crypto experience quickly turned into buying GPUs and mining DigiByte and Zcash. Luca: “My brother was a big computer nerd, and we had installed this app called Coinbase. We just started to buy and play around with things. But instead of buying a lot of crypto, what I ended up doing was buying a bunch of GPUs. I bought a lot of 1080 TIs, and we started mining. But we were mining DigiByte. We were mining all the wrong things, actually mining some Zcash too.”

Pudgy Penguins founder Luca Netz reveals what gives him an edge as a founder who actively trades onchain. Luca: “It’s given me such an edge because I know what’s fugazi before the timeline knows it’s fugazi. I know people that I’m, you know, I know who’s a good trader, right? I know who to ask. Every night, 15, 30 minutes before bed, I just hop on my laptop and I explore. That’s given me an edge, both in Pudgy Penguins and in crypto. I know what people want to see, I know what the next trend is, and I think that’s the key, is just to understand where the puck is going.”

Full Interview with @LucaNetz On How He Built The First Mainstream Crypto Company. 0:00 - From Homeless to Buying Pudgy for $2.5M 4:34 — Surviving the Bear 9:26 — The Founders He Looks Up To 13:07 — Solana vs Ethereum, 20:18 — The IPO & What's Next for Pudgy

Pudgy Penguins founder Luca Netz reveals how the company survived three brutal bearmarket shakeouts and kept coming back stronger. Luca: “It’s been now three times where we go up, we go down, everyone’s calling it a disaster, and then we just prove all the doubters wrong. I think so much of my personal story, so much of the co-founding team’s personal stories, is just about proving people wrong. We’ve been doing it for ten years. We’ll keep doing it for the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years.”

“As a trader, you shouldn’t rely on other people. You should find your own edge, because the amount of money is different, what you need to do with the money is different, and your time frame is different. You might need to make a lot of money this month, or you might be playing five years. If you’re trying to make a million dollars overnight, you’re probably gonna get cooked because you have to take super high risks. Whereas if you’re trying to slowly build up your portfolio and only take things you really believe in when you see a great opportunity, and you’re only taking those bets, that’s gonna play out much better for you.”

Rasmr reveals what gave him the conviction to join and work with fomo so early, “Rasmr; Well, you could read Ryan Watkins’ article from today about why social trading is the future. The institutional people are writing articles about it now. Everything that’s in that article, I was already thinking, like, eight months ago, and I just saw it correctly.”