While most 12-year-olds spend their time playing video games, Benyamin Ahmed creates NFT collections and earns a good chunk of money from them.
NFTs aka Non-Fungible Tokens are like digital assets which represent real-world objects such as art, music, collectibles and even real estate. They are part of the Ethereum blockchain in the form of digital tokens with additional information recorded on them which is used to uniquely identify the different assets and track their validity and ownership. Ahmed had always been interested in coding since he was just 5 years old and started learning HTML and CSS and continuing on to other programming languages. Earlier this year, NFTs piqued his interest and he decided to learn more in-depth about them. “I got fascinated with NFTs because you can easily transfer the ownership of an NFT by the blockchain,” he told CNBC.
His interest in technology led him to create an NFT collection of his own. He launched his first collection at the start of the year which was made up of 40 different pixelated avatars called Minecraft Yee Haa but it didn’t receive much attention and he wasn’t able to earn from it. Determined to learn from the past experience and make his work stand out, Ahmed took help from different online tutorials and mentors through Discord communities and started working on a second collection in June. The new collection called Weird Whales consisted of 3350 pixelated whales each with its own unique characteristic.
The NFT collection officially launched in July and was entirely sold out in less than nine hours, leaving him with $255,000 worth in today’s pricing! He then earned an additional $95,000 from the resale market and has made about $350,000 till now. By the end of this month, his total earnings would be over $400,000. At such a young age, Ahmed has proved that if you’re passionate about something, you can easily turn it into profit if you work hard enough for it!
