Pudgy Penguins is set to apologise for a racist X post it made last week following a complaint from the NFT project’s $5.3 billion football partner, Manchester City.
According to a series of screenshots, Manchester City reached out to Pudgy Penguins after it suggested via X that the social media platform’s crackdown on reply spam and “AI slop,” might “actually have a significant effect on India’s economy.”
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The post appeared to rely on the xenophobic stereotype that Indians are often behind bot or spam accounts associated with the so-called “InfoFi” sector.
Following Manchester City’s complaint, Pudgy Penguins acknowledged “that the tweet was inappropriate and does not reflect its company values.”
Pudgy Penguins’ press office said that it planned to reach out to the X user who flagged the post and “express their apology on the matter.” It added that it had removed the post from its channels.
Users ‘incredibly ashamed’ of Pudgy CEO Lucas Netz
The X user in question, “Satvik,” reported the post to Manchester City after other users tried to downplay it. Satvik said that Pudgy Penguins CEO Lucas Netz should be “incredibly ashamed” of his team for the post.
The account later added, “I’m fucking tired of how normalized racism against Indians has become on this platform, every single day we endure hurtful comments for simply existing online.”
Crypto founder Dan Sickles screenshotted the post, and later said that he wants to hear what company polices Netz will enact “to prevent incidents like this from happening again, and for him to condemn xenophobia and racism more generally.”
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Immediately after the post was called out, the account posted a smug response and claimed that it was just “farming yaps” (gaming social media engagement for profit).
Pudgy Penguins started by selling NFTs of cartoon penguins but in order to encourage more people outside of crypto to invest, it’s been branching out into markets including kids books, mobile games, designer collectibles, and football.
Often, its posts clash with its child-friendly branding and are instead geared towards trending topics in the financial sector and tech industry.
Netz and Pudgy Penguins haven’t publicly apologised for the post at the time of writing.
Protos has reached out to Pudgy Penguins for comment and will update this post should we hear anything back.
