Meet 12-year-old Benjamin Ahmed who made $1 million creating NFTs

A boy from London who is only 12 years old, and is already a self-made millionaire. All of this from creating online avatars – when he's not busy doing math homework. Benjamin Ahmed, an eighth grader with a knack for creating original images known as NFTs, has turned his skill into a massive crypto wallet worth nearly $1 million.

He did it in less than a year. His distinctive collection of 3,350 pixelated images show whales wearing baseball caps or sporting bandanas, smoking pipes, or wearing top hats, with a variety of colorful backgrounds. Primary school student Benjamin Ahmed created a set of cartoon whale avatars – and sold one for $20,000.

NY Post NFTs – short for non-fungible tokens – are cartoonish, digitally copyrighted avatars that are in high demand among the Bitcoin crowd and the metaverse. Some “exotic whales” were sold to Ahmed for $20,000. “I decided to choose a whale because a person who owns 1,000 bitcoins is called a whale,” Ahmed told The Post.

He learned about NFTs when a friend of his father, a programmer at the London Stock Exchange, bought a picture of Rare Pepe for $27,000. “It seemed ridiculously expensive at the time, but my dad’s friend sold the NFT just a few months later for half a million dollars,” Ahmed said.  The eighth-grader from London said he hasn't spent any of his $1 million windfall — yet.

Kadir Gold This kind of windfall was not unusual. The best known NFTs are from the CryptoPunks group, with some tokens reaching into the millions.

In 2021, NFT sales totaled $25 billion. So the brave young man, who learned the basics of coding when he was five years old, taught himself how to use Open Sea, the largest online NFT marketplace, and how to create his profile pictures. “Weird Whales” was released in June of 2021.

After its release, Ahmed posted a thread on Twitter about the composition of his whales. His posts went viral and he became something of a celebrity in the NFT world. He's now collaborating on other collections with designers who have worked at Marvel and Disney.

To date, the collections he has worked on have traded for a staggering $15 million, he says. He has personally earned around $1 million USD, all of which he keeps in cryptocurrencies. He didn't transfer a penny and didn't have a traditional bank account. He didn't buy anything from his windfall.

The young businessman said that he learned to write code when he was five years old. Kadir Gold He said: “There is a risk that everything will reach zero, but I don’t need the money yet.” “I'm confident [crypto] prices will go up a lot from here.” The eighth-grader, who enjoys swimming and taekwondo when he's not dictating his crypto wallet, initially wanted to keep quiet about his amazing success.

But when his story started making headlines, friends and family found out and began congratulating him in droves. His grandparents are particularly proud of his successes. “My grandfather is really sick at the moment, so it was heartwarming to see him following all the coverage with pride,” Ahmed said.

“It's not the money but moments like this that bring me the most happiness.”  https://nypost.com/2022/02/03/meet-the-12-year-old-boy-who-became-a-millionaire-off-nfts/