A 12-year-old boy from London has made about \u00a3290,000 during the school holidays, after creating a series of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With NFTs, artwork can be “tokenised” to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They do not generally give the buyer the actual artwork or its copyright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Benyamin Ahmed is keeping his earnings in the form of Ethereum – the crypto-currency in which they were sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This means they could go up or down in value and there is no back-up from the authorities if the digital wallet in which he is holding them is hacked or compromised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He has never had a traditional bank account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Extremely proud
Benyamin’s classmates are as yet unaware of his new-found crypto-wealth, although he has made YouTube videos about his hobby, which he enjoys alongside swimming, badminton and taekwondo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“My advice to other children that maybe want to get into this space is don’t force yourself to do coding, maybe because you get peer pressured – just as if you like cooking, do cooking, if you like dancing, do dances, just do it to the best of your ability,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Benyamin’s father, Imran, a software developer who works in traditional finance, encouraged Benyamin and his brother, Yousef, to start coding at the ages of five and six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The children have had the advantage of a strong network of technology experts to call on for advice and help – but he is extremely proud of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More serious
“It was a little bit of a fun exercise – but I picked up on really early that they were really receptive to it and they were really good,” Imran said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“So then we started getting a little bit more serious – and now it’s every single day\u2026 but you can’t cram this stuff, you can’t say I’m going to learn coding in three months.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The boys did 20 or 30 minutes of coding exercises a day – including on holiday, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Weird Whales is Benyamin’s second digital-art collection, following an earlier Minecraft-inspired set that sold less well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This time, he drew inspiration from a well known pixelated whale meme image and a popular digital-art style but used his own program to create the set of 3,350 emoji-type whales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It was interesting to see all of them hatch, as they appeared on my screen slowly generating,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Benyamin is already working on his third, superhero-themed collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He would also like to make an “underwater game” featuring the whales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“That would be amazing,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imran is “100% certain” his son has not broken copyright law and has engaged lawyers to “audit” his work, as well as getting advice on how to trademark his own designs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The art world is divided over the current trend for NFTs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artists say they are a useful additional line of revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there are many stories of eye-wateringly high sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there is also scepticism over whether they are a realistic long-term investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And former Christie’s auctioneer Charles Allsopp BBC News buying them made “no sense”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The idea of buying something which isn’t there is just strange,” he said earlier this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“People who invest in it are slight mugs – but I hope they don’t lose their money.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A 12-year-old boy from London has made about \u00a3290,000 during the school holidays, after creating a series of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With NFTs, artwork can be “tokenised” to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold. They do not generally give the buyer the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n