London, Aug 31: A 12-year-old coder named Benyamin Ahmed won £ 290,000 (or around € 338,000) after creating 3,350 pixelated digitalized whale drawings called “Weird Whales”. Ben created the set of whales in the style of a common whale meme seen in the video game Minecraft on a pixel art website. He sold these using NFTs. Non-fungible tokens (NFT) act as a digita` l certificate of authenticity and ownership for artworks and online assets (NFT was covered in the 18th May edition). NFTs are unique digital assets, including jpegs and video clips, that are represented by code recorded on a blockchain. Each NFT can be bought and sold, just like physical assets, but the blockchain allows for the ownership and validity of each to be tracked.
Benyamin is storing his earnings in Ethereum, a cryptocurrency that was also used to sell the whale artwork. Benyamin’s primary earnings generated a total of 80 Ether tokens, worth about $248,000 at the time. He is also entitled to a 2.5% commission each time the NFTs resell, so another 30 Ether.
