12 Year Old Makes $400,000 Selling NFT Art

A 12-year-old boy from London has made about £290,000 during the school holidays, after creating a series of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With NFTs, artwork can be "tokenised" to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold. They do not generally give the buyer the actual artwork or its copyright. Benyamin Ahmed is keeping his earnings in the form of Ethereum - the crypto-currency in which they were sold. This means they could go up or down in value and there is no back-up from the authorities if the digital wallet in which he is holding them is hacked or compromised. He has never had a traditional bank account.

"It was a little bit of a fun exercise - but I picked up on really early that they were really receptive to it and they were really good," Imran said. "So then we started getting a little bit more serious - and now it's every single day... but you can't cram this stuff, you can't say I'm going to learn coding in three months." The boys did 20 or 30 minutes of coding exercises a day - including on holiday, he said. Weird Whales is Benyamin's second digital-art collection, following an earlier Minecraft-inspired set that sold less well. This time, he drew inspiration from a well known pixelated whale meme image and a popular digital-art style but used his own program to create the set of 3,350 emoji-type whales. The art world is divided over the current trend for NFTs. Artists say they are a useful additional line of revenue. And there are many stories of eye-wateringly high sales. But there is also scepticism over whether they are a realistic long-term investment.



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https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58343062