Whatever Happened To The 12-Year-Old NFT Millionaire?

You might think: How does a 12-year-old from London fit into the world of cryptocurrencies and NFTs? Don’t all 12-year-olds spend their time playing video games and doing their homework? It appears that, at least in the case of Benyamin Ahmed, age is not a barrier to entry at all. The young prodigy released a collection called “Weird Whales,” and his life certainly changed from there. He learned about NFTs and cryptocurrencies by accident and he applied his already existing programming knowledge in order to create his own series of NFTs, which launched in June 2021.

Ahmed started learning coding at the age of five, so by age twelve, he was more proficient at writing code than a lot of adults. He taught himself how to generate pixelated images of whales with various hats and additions, and then, he generated a total of 3,350 to be put into a collection. Once “Weird Whales” went viral on Twitter, the pricing for these NFTs skyrocketed, with some whales being sold for the equivalent of $20,000 apiece. In total, collections that Ahmed worked on traded for over $15 million, while Ahmed himself managed to amass over $1 million worth of cryptocurrency as of early 2022. He told the New York Post in an interview that he doesn’t even have a traditional bank account if he should ever want to convert his crypto riches.