How are your school holidays going? Have you learned to do anything new or exciting? My wild guess is that most of us would spend our holidays doing what we enjoy. Surprisingly, during the school vacations, a 12-year-old boy earns £290,000 by selling digital whale art. Isn’t it incredible that this boy can do what he loves while still earning a lot of money? Read on with Illume to learn more about this remarkable youngster.
During the school vacations, a 12-year-old boy earned the equivalent of £290,000 by selling digital artworks of whales online.
After designing hundreds of distinct pixelated whales, Benyamin Ahmed of north London marketed his artwork as a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs are digital assets that represent files such as jpegs, video clips, and other forms of art.
They are purchased and traded online via a cryptocurrency network and, in principle, serve as a digital ownership certificate.
A blockchain digital ledger stores information on who owns what.
Benyamin, who has been coding since he was five years old, became interested in NFTs early this year and wanted to start his own collection.
Weird Whales, a game that contains 3,350 pixelated whales, each with unique characteristics, has sold for about £116,000 in the cryptocurrency Ethereum.
Because Benyamin does not have a bank account, he will hold his profits in Ethereum, the digital currency in which the purchasers paid for the NFTs.
However, it means that his money can fluctuate and is not secure if his digital wallet is stolen or hijacked.
“I’m not a natural artist,” he answered an interview, “but I watched a few YouTube videos and worked out how to draw whales in pixel form really quickly.”
“It took me a few weeks to create the base images and various accessories and then I fed them into my programme that helped me to configure the rarity across the different traits, making some more collectible than others.”
Benyamin’s Weird Whales collection sold out in nine hours after it went on sale online in July.
This is the 12-year-old’s second NFT collection. His first, Minecraft Yee Haa, was released earlier this summer and comprises of 40 colorful, pixelized characters.
Benyamin’s sales have already surpassed £291,000, and he is expected to become the youngest person to earn a million dollars in cryptocurrency.
His father, Imran, who has built software for the London Stock Exchange, taught him and his older brother, Yusuf, how to code.
His father stated: “I’m so proud of Benyamin and what he’s achieved.”
“People are shocked that someone so young can create something like this and we’ve had some people thinking that he must be a Russian hacker impersonating a child and not a 12-year-old schoolboy from London.”
“There’s lots of mathematics and computer science involved,” he said, “especially when configuring the rarities and deploying the assets on the blockchain.”