A 12 years old earns £290,000 by selling the digital whale emojis

Benyamin Ahmed, a 12-year-old boy, has made about £290,000 by selling digital whale emojis called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). According to accounts, the child began coding when he was five years old, inspired by his father Imran, a software engineer.

NFTs allow artwork to be “tokenized,” creating a digital evidence of ownership that can be purchased and sold. They seldom offer the customer the original artwork or the copyright to it.

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Benyamin Ahmed is keeping his profits in Ethereum, the cryptocurrency in which they were acquired. That means they can go up or down in value, and there is no backup from authorities if they are hacked or compromised in the digital wallet they are stored in.

Benyamin Ahmed used his own program to create 3,350 emoji-like whales by combining a well-known pixelated whale meme picture with a famous digital-art style. He told BBC that it was fascinating to witness all of them hatch as they showed on his screen gradually developing.

Benyamin’s peers are still ignorant of his newfound crypto-wealth, despite the fact that he has created YouTube videos about his hobby, which he likes in addition to swimming, badminton, and karate.

Weird Whales is Benyamin’s second digital-art collection, following a less successful Minecraft-inspired set. Benyamin is already hard at work on his third collection, which will be based on superheroes. He also wants to create a “underwater game” using whales.