12-year-old Self-Made Millionaire: Rich Through NFTs

London-based Benyamin Ahmed is just twelve years old, but has already earned a million dollars with NFTs he created himself.

Benyamin learned programming from his father when he was still in preschool. With his “weird whales,” the 2021 student has created a digital collection of 3,350 pixelated images.

Each image is unique, differing in coloration and details, such as headgear. He created NFTs from the images and offered them for sale. The starting price was around 60 dollars, but some images were traded for 20,000 dollars in the meantime. The entire collection sold out within a day of publication, fetching around $400,000. According to his own statement, the student kept the money entirely in cryptocurrency – he did not have a regular bank account at the time.

What are NFTs?

NFT stands for “Non fungible token” – so literally it is a “denotes a non-exchangeable digital asset.” Or simply put, a unique digital asset with a certificate of authenticity.

The certificate of authenticity is issued decentrally via the blockchain, creating a unique digital asset that can be sold and bought like a real asset:

NFTs can be created on corresponding platforms, whereby a work – as in Benyamin Ahmed’s case, a digital whale painting – is provided with a unique signature, which is then stored on the blockchain. Once written, this file cannot be subsequently altered, making the work forgery-proof and a digital original that exists only once.

This opens up new possibilities for monetizing works of art.

The big advantage is that creators also get a share of a few percent in every resale. If prices rise over time, they can earn a hefty share of every subsequent sale. And that’s how Benyamin Ahmed has made an estimated one million dollars. The trading volume of NFTs has virtually exploded in recent years: in 2021, NFTs were sold for a total of 16 billion dollars.

Entering the NTF world

In principle, anyone can create and sell NFTs. The prerequisite is that you own the property rights to the work you want to sell as an NFT. And one must have a crypto wallet with funds. This is used to pay the fees for creation and sales commission, and also to process payment.

Then one just has to choose a marketplace, there the NFT will be created and offered for sale. Current marketplaces are:

• NFT Launchpad
• OpenSea
• Crypto.com