A 12-year-old boy made over $398,900 with digital whale art NFTs by selling tokens of their ownership, stored on a blockchain. Here’s how a summer break artwork blew up online.
All about the creator of ‘Weird Whales’ the digital whale art
Benyamin Ahmed, a 12-year old made a collection of pixelated artwork, now called Weird Whales. Weird Whales is a set of 3,350 whales, in the common whale meme style from Minecraft, on a pixel art website. His father, a software developer helped him with non-fungible tokens for the same. “People find the art secondary. Imagine when the printing press came out, if you managed to get hold of a book that was an original, written by a 12-year-old that went viral, you can imagine how that would accrue value over time because of the historical significance,” said the boy’s father.
“I chose whales because in cryptocurrency a whale is someone with 1,000 bitcoin,” said Ben. “Then I can say that everyone who owns a whale, is a whale. I could craft that catchline,” he added. “People connected with my story because I was so young. Many people saw my story and connected and then it kind of just went everywhere,” he added. The young coding enthusiast promoted himself on social media.
Young coder: A harbinger of business models that can change regular banking
The youngster may just be a harbinger of where we are going to be in few years. After all, it validates what people have been saying about blockchains and cryptocurrency. He is probably the first person in history to do this. Ben is currently storing all his earning in Ethereum, the same platform he used to sell the artwork in.
“Ben has never interacted with the traditional legacy financial system. He has never had an accountant, a bank account, he has never registered a company,” said Imran Ahmed, the father. “It makes no sense. The prices of this artwork for a young artist. Everybody who you explain it to says, ‘I don’t get it. Why are they paying thousands of dollars?’ But people in blockchain, what they see is that blockchains are here and they are here for the next 500 years,” he added.