When I saw this thread circulating during NFT season, my first reaction wasn’t shock, it was déjà vu.
It comes back, and somehow so does every familiar name from the last cycle, the good, the bad, and apparently the previously investigated.
This time it’s Cole Villemain, better known online as ColeThereum, a Pudgy Penguins co-founder who was pushed out of his own project by the community he built it with. He’s back, he’s raised over a million dollars in hours, and a lot of people online, including a detailed recap posted by @ProMint_X, are asking the same question I am: didn’t we already do this?
Before Pudgy Penguins There Was A Dropshipping Business
Long before penguins made him famous, Villemain ran an e-commerce dropshipping operation called eBoy Outlet. The business’s Facebook and Instagram pages were littered with negative reviews and complaints from dissatisfied customers who claimed they hadn’t received their orders or refunds. Both social pages were deleted shortly after on-chain investigator ZachXBT highlighted them publicly. When pressed on it, Villemain clarified it was a drop-shipping business he founded early on without much capital, and he’s since pointed to COVID-era disruption as the real reason the business collapsed, saying he simply didn’t have the capital to keep it running through the chaos rather than any intent to deceive customers.
Zachxbt’s 2021 Investigation And The Allegations That Followed
By 2021, Villemain had rebranded as ColeThereum and built a real following on NFT Twitter, promoting projects to an audience that trusted him. That trust was tested on August 12, 2021, when ZachXBT posted a widely-shared tweet thread accusing him of unethical behavior, including running eBoy Outlet. The thread went further than the dropshipping complaints, though. Villemain had also previously admitted to promoting projects without disclosing that he was paid to endorse them, and separately came under fire for promising to give away a Fame Lady Squad NFT to a follower before listing that same NFT for sale on OpenSea instead. He later insisted the giveaway was still the plan and that the listing had only gone up after a community member publicly questioned it.
Cole didn’t dodge the paid-promotion accusation outright. His own response, quoted widely at the time and referenced again in @starplatinum_’s recent post, was blunt: “I share NFT projects. It’s what I do. Was I paid a couple times? Yes. Do I regret those? Yes. Am I going to stop sharing NFT projects I like? No. Am I going to be more careful? Yes.” It’s an answer that satisfied some followers at the time and confirmed suspicions for others.
Separately, Villemain had also launched an NFT collection called My Fucking Pickle before Pudgy Penguins, a project some described as a cash grab given its lack of innovation, and that project, which ZachXBT’s original investigation described as one Villemain had founded, eventually went inactive and was abandoned, much like several other projects tied to his name over the years.
The Pudgy Penguins Rise And The Fallout That Followed
None of that history stopped Pudgy Penguins from becoming one of the defining collections of the cycle. The project launched on July 23, 2021, with 8,888 NFTs on Ethereum priced at 0.03 ETH, and sold out in under 30 minutes. The initial mint brought the team roughly $800,000 in revenue, and the collection would go on to generate $145 million in total trading volume on OpenSea.
The good times didn’t last. Within months, holders were raising concerns over unfulfilled roadmap promises, weak execution, lack of transparency around treasury usage, and a growing sense of distrust toward the founding team. By January 2022, those concerns turned into open accusations. A viral thread from NFT influencer 9x9x9eth alleged that the Pudgy Penguins founders were looking to sell the project after emptying its treasury for themselves. The thread specifically alleged that Villemain had offered to sell a 20% stake in the project for 4,000 ETH, worth around $12.9 million at the time, a price that was reportedly later reduced to as little as 888 ETH as the community’s confidence continued to erode.
What happened next was decisive. ZachXBT and numerous community members publicly questioned the integrity of the original team, and a Discord vote ultimately led to the team losing community support altogether. Holders effectively pushed Cole out through that private community vote. Some recent posts recirculating his history, including the list published by @ProMint_X, now describe the treasury allegations as “confirmed theft”, though it’s worth noting Villemain has never faced formal legal proceedings over those claims, even as the reputational fallout stuck permanently to his name.
In April 2022, Luca Netz acquired Pudgy Penguins for 750 ETH, and the project went on to become one of the biggest brand-crossover success stories in NFTs under his leadership, a fairly stark contrast to how close it came to collapsing entirely.
From Superthereum To Spritehood: The Comeback Nobody Asked For
Villemain didn’t disappear after the ouster. In 2023, he resurfaced under the name SuperThereum, signaling a return to building in the NFT space. And now, in 2026, with NFT trading volumes climbing again across new chains, he’s back with Spritehood, a collection built directly on Robinhood Chain, the blockchain infrastructure tied to the trading platform Robinhood, and one he’s promoting directly through his own X profile.
The numbers this time are hard to ignore. Cole launched Spritehood on Robinhood Chain with a supply of roughly 44,444 pieces at a $17 mint price, fully sold out, raising around $750,000 in the process, with the collection reportedly trading at multiples above mint price shortly after. That raise, pulled in within just hours of launch, is exactly the detail fueling the current wave of posts, asking whether the market has simply forgotten, or never knew in the first place, who they’re minting from.
How This Cycle’s Comeback Story Might End
The reaction online has split, more or less, into two camps. One side argues that people deserve room to rebuild after mistakes, especially years-old ones tied to a chaotic, largely unregulated NFT boom where plenty of founders made questionable calls. The other side is less forgiving, circulating recap threads that lump the eBoy Outlet complaints, the undisclosed paid promotions, and the Pudgy Penguins treasury allegations together as a pattern rather than a series of unrelated incidents. eBoy Outlet’s undelivered dropshipping orders with zero refunds, the admitted paid shilling without disclosure, and the Pudgy Penguins treasury allegations, followed by the observation that after all of that, he launched a new NFT collection, made roughly $700,000, and is now posting about being back like it’s 2021 all over again.
That sentiment is echoed sharply elsewhere too, one post argues it’s precisely people like this, and the poor investment decisions that follow them, that keep the broader market stuck in a bear cycle rather than building real momentum.
What’s genuinely new this time is the speed and scale of the money involved. Raising roughly $750,000 in hours, on a brand-new chain, with a name that already has a documented public record attached to it, says something about where NFT sentiment currently sits, enthusiasm is apparently outrunning memory. Whether Spritehood becomes a legitimate long-term project or just another entry on a growing list depends entirely on what Villemain actually delivers from here, not on what he’s promoted in the past. For now, the market has spoken with its wallet. Whether it remembers the history that came with it is a separate question entirely.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.
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