All from creating online avatars â when heâs not busy doing math homework.
Benyamin Ahmed, an eighth grader with a knack for coming up with original images known as NFTs, has turned his skill into a massive crypto wallet worth about $1 million. And he did it in less than a year.
His signature collection of 3,350 pixelated images features whales wearing baseball caps or sweatbands, smoking pipes or donning top hats, with a variety of colorful backgrounds.
Plucky grade school boy Benyamin Ahmed created a collection of cartoonish whale avatars â and sold one for $20,000.NY Post photo compositeThese NFTs â short for non-fungible tokens â are cartoonish, digitally copyrighted avatars, which are in high demand among the bitcoin and metaverse set. Some of Ahmedâs âWeird Whalesâ have sold for $20,000.
âI decided on a whale because someone who owns 1,000 bitcoins is called a whale,â Ahmed told The Post.
He learned about NFTs when a friend of his father, who is a programmer for the London stock exchange, bought aRare Pepeimage for $27,000.
âIt sounded ridiculously expensive at the time, but my dadâs friend sold his NFT just a few months later for half a million dollars,â Ahmed said, âI became fascinated that someone was willing to pay this much for a jpeg!â
The eighth grader from London said he hasnât spent any of his $1 million windfall âyet.Kadir GoldAnd that kind of windfall was not unusual. The best known NFTs are from theCryptoPunkscollection, with some avatars going formillions. In 2021, NFT sales totaled$25 billion.
So the plucky tween, who learned the basics of coding when he was just five, taught himself how to use Open Sea, the largest online NFT marketplace, and how to generate his own profile pictures. He released âWeird Whalesâ in June of 2021.
After his launch, Ahmed posted a Twitter thread about creating his whales. His posts went viral and he became something of a celebrity in the NFT universe. Heâs now collaborating on other collections with designers who have worked for Marvel and Disney.
To date, the collections heâs worked on have traded at a staggering $15 million, he says. Heâs personally pocketed about $1 million, all of which he keeps in cryptocurrency. He hasnât converted a penny and doesnât even have a traditional bank account. Heâs bought nothing from his windfall.
The pint-sized tycoon said he learned to write code when he was just five.Kadir GoldâThereâs a risk that it could all go to zero, but I donât need the money yet,â he said. âIâm confident that [crypto] prices will increase a lot more from here.â
The 8th grader, who enjoys swimming and taekwondo when heâs not fattening his crypto wallet, initially wanted to keep quiet about his staggering success. But when his story began to make headlines, friends and family found out and began congratulating him in droves.
His grandparents are especially proud of his successes.
âMy grandad is really ill at the moment, so it was heartwarming to see him follow all the coverage with pride,â Ahmed said.
âItâs not the money but the moments like this that bring me the most happiness.â
https://nypost.com/2022/02/03/meet-the-12-year-old-boy-who-became-a-millionaire-off-nfts/