12-Year-Old 'Weird Whales' NFT Creator Set to Rake in $400K Worth of Ether

The non-fungible token (NFT) industry has taken the world by storm and a number of artists are making six to seven figures from NFT collections. One particular NFT creator is 12-year-old Benyamin Ahmed from London who curated a project called “Weird Whales,” an NFT collection that features 3,350 pixelated whales. After the project launch, the young software engineer raked in $350K worth of ether.

Benyamin Ahmed Projects He Will Make $400K With His ‘Weird Whales’ NFT Collection

This week, the news outlet CNBC interviewed a 12-year-old boy who has earned $250K after launching a project called “Weird Whales.” Benyamin Ahmed, who started coding at age five, also collected 30 ether worth more than $95K from the Weird Whales’ royalties. Every time a whale is sold, Ahmed gets 2.5% on every secondary sale.

Weird Whales is similar to NFT projects like Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) as there are only 3,350 pixelated whales in the collection. The whale-inspired NFT collection is Ahmed’s second NFT venture as he launched another project called Minecraft Yee Haa. Ahmed watched his father work as a web developer and the 12-year-old has learned HTML and CSS, alongside Javascript as well.

“I first learned about NFTs earlier this year,” Ahmed said during his interview. “I got fascinated with NFTs because you can easily transfer the ownership of an NFT by the blockchain.”

Weird Whales Project Only Cost $300 in Ether Transaction Fees

Ahmed explains that he doesn’t use a bank account to store his wealth and told CNBC that he leverages a cryptocurrency wallet. “I plan to keep all my ether and not convert it to fiat money,” Ahmed emphasized. “It might be early proof that, in the future, maybe everyone doesn’t [need] a bank account and just has an ether address and a wallet.” He further explained that at some point he may open a bank account to report taxes.

The boy also spent a lot of time playing Minecraft and he’s crafted a lot of original material. The NFT projects stemmed from this trend “after spending too many hours playing Minecraft.” Ahmed said that he plans to craft more NFT collections and he believes memes are very powerful. “I think memes have significant value in this space, as a lot of projects have some kind of meme-link to it,” Ahmed concluded. “I think memes play a big part in this space.”

To-date, Ahmed has raked in roughly $350K worth of ether and he expects the projected total will be around $400K. Ahmed said the initial capital to get the project going was around $300 in ETH fees.