Ousted Pudgy Penguins Co-Founder Sells Out 44,444-Piece NFT Mint on Robinhood Chain

Cole Villemain, the Pudgy Penguins co-founder whose holders voted him out in January 2022, sold out a 44,444-piece NFT collection on Robinhood Chain in under an hour early Tuesday, taking in roughly $1.28 million according to an onchain tally of the mint transactions.

Villemain, who posts as ColeThereum, opened the public mint for the collection, Spritehood, at 2:18 a.m. ET on Aug. 11. "The mint is open. Everyone is welcome. Have fun choosing your class," he wrote. Fifty-seven minutes later he declared it finished: "Sold out. I'm back in the NFT game."

An onchain analysis published by the X account 0xlaplaced put the take higher than the numbers that circulated during the sale. Counting mint events, the analyst found the paid sale lasted 53 minutes and 48 seconds from the first paid mint at 06:17 UTC, with 37,430 tokens sold at $17 and 5,526 at $117, matching a $100 upgrade offered on the mint site.

That works out to $1,282,852, or 684.28 ETH at the contract's mint-time pricing. Before the paid sale opened, according to the same analysis, the contract deployer issued 1,488 tokens for free across 20 zero-price transactions. The $755,000 and $775,000 totals that spread on X were snapshots taken while the mint was still running, 0xlaplaced said. The tally comes from one independent analyst, not from the project or a verified contract.

The contract itself is not verified. Robinhood Chain's Blockscout explorer lists the Spritehood Wisp ERC-721 token, symbol WISP, at address 0xd6577124F96394faee65AfD2408f2ffA88445f63 with a total supply of 44,444 and its source code unverified, leaving buyers without published code for the mechanics that priced and distributed their tokens.

Villemain made no secret of the playbook. Teasing the project on July 11, he wrote that he was "delusional enough to believe I can drop the #1 NFT on Robinhood Chain" and that it was "90% built."

Weeks later he pitched a giveaway as "running back one of the oldest tricks in the book of 2021 NFT projects," offering to design and mint a token for a user who liked, reposted and followed the Spritehood account. Sixteen minutes into the sale he wrote that it "feels so good to be back" and that "haters will be out tonight but I don't care."

They were. X user HanIsRich called the sale "purely a cashgrab," writing that "there is no NFT infrastructure or mechanism he will build that will cost up to 20% of the mint funds," and argued that repeated mints of this kind would mean "liquidity on the chain will easily be extracted by a few [people,] and it turns to a dead chain."

Villemain's record is the reason the mint drew scrutiny at all.

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT published a thread examining him on Aug. 11, 2021 --- five years to the day before the Spritehood sellout --- writing that the NFT boom "brings opportunists who deceive people at whatever cost to get what they want."

Pudgy Penguins opened a community vote in its Discord for Pudgy Penguin, Lil Pudgy and Pudgy Rod holders on Jan. 5, 2022, and holders used it to remove the founding team amid accusations that they had misused the project's treasury. Those accusations remain allegations; Villemain has not been charged over them, and Pudgy Penguins went on to become one of the most commercially successful NFT brands under new management.

What the 44,444 buyers get for their $17 or $117 is now the open question. Villemain has described infrastructure and mechanisms to come without publishing verified code for the contract that collected the money.

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