Boy, 12, earns around £290,000 by selling digital whale emojis

LONDON: A 12-year-old boy named Benyamin Ahmed has earned around £290,000 by selling the digital whale emojis as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

Benyamin Ahmed, 12, crafted a collection of pixelated artwork called Weird Whales and earned around £290,000.

According to reports, the boy started coding when he was five years old after being encouraged by his father Imran, who is a software developer.

Ahmed had made a Minecraft-inspired digital-art collection that consisted of 40 colourful, pixelized avatars called Minecraft Yee Haa, however, it did not sell for a whopping amount. And later he went on for Weird Whales.

For creating 3,350 emoji-type whales, Benyamin Ahmed used his own program by using a well-known pixelated whale meme image and a popular digital-art style.

He told BBC that it was interesting to see all of them hatch, as they appeared on my screen slowly generating.

Pixel art has been used by Ahmed to create all the base layers for the whales and the traits.

According to the NFT website, “He then generated 3350 unique digital collectibles programmatically using an open-source Python script that he customised for his collection. It is the first instance of a Kawaii pixel whale used in a generative art project with custom on-chain and cryptographically secure provenance.”

The boy is now working on a superhero-themed digital art collection.

He doesn’t have a traditional bank account, only a cryptocurrency wallet. The boy decided to keep his earnings in the form of Ethereum, the cryptocurrency in which his collection of 3,350 whales was sold.

The boy learned about NFTs earlier this year. He told CNBC that he got fascinated with NFTs because everyone can easily transfer the ownership of an NFT by the blockchain.