12-year-old boy makes £290,000 by selling ownership of digital whale art
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Benyamin Ahmed, a 12-year-old coder, has earned £290,000 by creating digital art of whales named 'Weird Whales' and selling tokens of their ownership.
His father, Imran told The Guardian that the whale artwork is similar to digital Pokemon cards. He added that the big success is due to the collectors' realisation of their historical significance.
The collection of pixelated artworks went viral during the school holidays after Ahmed promoted himself by sharing the thread on Twitter and creating a LinkedIn page. He also has a YouTube channel. Benyamin has created a set of 3,350 whales in a common whale meme seen in the video game Minecraft on a pixel art website and sold non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs allow the artwork to be tokenised into a digital certificate of ownership. Purchasers do not acquire the actual artwork. The ownership is stored on a blockchain. But the artwork is too big to be stored on the blockchain.
Imran said that the whale art is similar to an original like the first book ever printed. "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."
Imran told The Guardian that people do not understand why Benyamin's clients are paying thousands of dollars for an artwork by a young artist. But people in blockchain see it as "a harbinger of where we are going to be in maybe 10, 15, 25 years. It kind of validates what everybody has been saying about blockchains, about bitcoin and Ethereum." He added that Benyamin is the first person in history to have done this.
The young coder says that he chose whales because in cryptocurrency a whale is someone with 1,000 bitcoin. He added that he could craft the catchline "everyone who owns a whale, is a whale". He thinks that his age and story connected him to people and helped him go viral.
Imran works as a software engineer in traditional finance. Inspired by him, Benyamin and his brother Yousef have been coding since the ages of five and six.