Benyamin Ahmed’s NFT collection Weird Whales launched just last month.
Benyamin Ahmed, a 12-year-old coder based in London, is getting a lot of attention lately thanks to the flurry of press he’s gotten for creating a collection of digital whales that are selling as NFTs. According to CNBC, Ahmed is on track to earn over $400,000 from the collection, which launched just last month.
The young entrepreneur started learning to code at 5 years old after being inspired by his dad Imran, a web developer. Earlier this year, Benyamin became interested in NFTs, those ubiquitous nonfungible tokens tied to everything from videos to artwork to tweets. Like cryptocurrency, NFTs are recorded in a digital ledger, so there’s a listing of who owns what.
Ahmed launched his first NFT collection earlier this summer consisting of 40 avatars called Minecraft Yee Haa he coded and designed himself. While that collection didn’t sell right away, he started work on another in June called Weird Whales, featuring 3,350 pixelated whales with attributes like different colors and hats. He learned to code the collection from online tutorials and people he met on gaming chat app Discord, he described in a Q&A video on YouTube.
The collection launched in July and reportedly sold out in nine hours. That day, Ahmed made more than 80 ether (another cryptocurrency like bitcoin). According to CNBC, he’s kept those profits in ether, which with today’s pricing amounts to over $255,000. With the additional 30 ether he’s earned from resales (he reportedly gets a 2.5% royalty on each secondary sale), Ahmed has now made more than $350,000, and told CNBC he’s slated to reach over $400,000 (roughly £290,592, AU$547,046) by the end of the month.
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