Benyamin Ahmed, a 12-year-old school student from London, made the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars by selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for his collection of weird whale pictures.

Benyamin's father is a developer who encouraged the boy and his brother to learn programming from a young age, so Ahmed started coding at 5. The boys set aside 20-30 minutes for programming every day, including weekends. The 12-year-old started with HTML and CSS and continued to improve his coding skills, later learning JavaScript.

Benyamin later discovered NFTs and was delighted with this technology, so he decided to create his own collection of NFTs. NFT is a special unique digital token used to confirm ownership of digital assets and the right to use them. In the first half of 2021, NFT sales grew more than 18,000%, with total transactions of over $2.5 billion.

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Benyamin, who is fond of programming and the popular computer game Minecraft, encoded 40 pixelated characters in NFTs. The first collection called Minecraft Yee Haa did not become popular, but Ahmed did not stop there and created a new one – using a script, he generated a series of digital pixel art whales called Weird Whales. The collection includes 3,350 images of whales, where each has its own unique features.

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The second collection, in turn, gained immense popularity on the crypto market. After launching in July, the entire collection was sold out in just nine hours, and Benyamin earned more than 80 ethers per day (an equivalent to about $250 thousand as of August 27).

After that, he earned another 30 Ethereum (~$90 thousand) by reselling his works – each resale brings the boy 2.5% of royalties. Ahmed does not have a bank account yet, so he keeps money in a cryptocurrency wallet, but he plans to create a bank account later for tax purposes.

According to Ahmed, he spent only $300 on the Weird Whales project and learned how to create NFTs from online tutorials and community tips on Discord.

Now the boy is working on the third collection of NFTs about superheroes.