A 12-year-old boy made 2.5 million yuan selling NFT "emoticons" in one summer vacation

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A 12-year-old boy drew a series of paintings during the summer vacation and sold them on the blockchain in the form of NFTs. The virtual currency he earned was equivalent to 2.5 million RMB !

These paintings are not sophisticated works of art, but just a series of pixel-style whales.

Each whale has unique colors and accessories, just like... a set of emojis .

This set of Weird Whales emoticons was created by Benjamin, a 12-year-old British boy. There are 3,350 whales in various shapes and colors.

Not that he painted all of them by hand.

He started his summer vacation in June this year, and first drew whale bodies of different colors, various hats, pipes and other accessories, and then wrote a script in Python to arrange and combine them and automatically generate the label information required for sale on the blockchain.

After the entire series went on sale in July, it was sold out in less than 9 hours, and Benjamin Jr. received 80 ETH (Ethereum) , which is worth more than RMB 1.6 million at today's price.

That’s not all. People who buy these whale paintings can also conduct second-hand transactions, and Benjamin Jr. can receive a 2.5% royalty commission for each transaction .

So far, a total of 1,500 buyers have participated in it, and the total transaction amount has reached 1,500 ETH (30 million RMB).

This means that Benjamin Jr. later earned more than 30 ETH (600,000 RMB) from the commission.

At this rate, it is estimated that the total value of virtual currency he has earned before school starts will exceed 2.5 million RMB.

Who are the people who are crazy about buying these virtual paintings?

What are NFTs? Who is buying them?

The full name of NFT is Non-Fungible Token .

Non-fungibility means that each coin has a unique and exclusive identifier, and the smallest unit is 1, unlike Bitcoin where you can only buy 0.1.

It is similar to how every ID card has a unique ID number.

NFT is equivalent to the "identity card" of digital assets , which can point to a GIF expression, an audio, video or a code.

Owning an NFT proves your ownership of the digital asset it points to.

The data on the blockchain cannot be forged and can be authenticated at any time, which ensures that the NFT purchased is authentic and scarce, making it a new favorite among collectors.

For example, the NBA has now authorized some blockchain companies to issue NFT digital collectibles such as wonderful goal videos, which are equivalent to animated digital star cards.

Okay, now that we understand what NFT collection is, let’s get back to Benjamin Jr. and his “Strange Whale” series.

His father believes that the reason why these collectors are keen to buy his son's works is not because they think these whale paintings have great artistic value, but more because they see the historical value in them :

A 12-year-old child has a digital wallet and earns a lot of money before having his own bank account. This will become a memorable moment in the history of digital currency development and has the prospect of appreciation in the future.

Benjamin Jr. chose to paint whales not just because he liked them, there is another explanation for this.

In the cryptocurrency world, “whale” is used to describe large players or institutions that own more than 1,000 bitcoins.

Just like the traditional saying of “a financial tycoon”, the corresponding term in the cryptocurrency world is “a Bitcoin whale”.

This connection makes it possible for this set of whale pixel art to become a meme and further hype and increase in value .

Just like Dogecoin was hyped up by players represented by Musk because it was related to the popular dog-head terrier on the Internet.

Benjamin Jr. keeps all his money in an Ethereum wallet and does not plan to exchange it for pounds. He also believes that in the future people will not need bank accounts at all, only digital wallets will be enough.

However, according to current British law, his father has to open a bank account for him to pay taxes.

I don’t know what the future will be like, but at least for now we can’t rely entirely on digital currency to live.

Benjamin's father is a software developer in the financial industry. He taught Benjamin and his younger brother programming when they were 5 or 6 years old.

The brothers practice programming for dozens of minutes almost every day. On the programming challenge platform CodeWars, their scores are ranked in the top 6% of the entire site.

Benjamin has his own Github account, and has also opened Youtube, Twitter and Instagram accounts to promote his strange whale paintings.

In addition to his own creations, he also bought a lot of NFT collectibles.

He wrote in his self-introduction:

I love digital currency and NFT, I love programming, I love memes, I love life

There is everything on NFT

NFT is actually not that far away and it also exists in China.

For example, the Dunhuang Flying Apsaras-themed payment code skin launched by Alipay in June was sold out in seconds after it went on sale.

Later, the price of the product was raised to a sky-high level on Xianyu, and it was finally removed from the shelves by the official Xianyu website.

In addition, Tencent also launched its own blockchain trading platform Huanhe.

The paintings and records sold on Huanhe are limited in quantity and are usually sold out within seconds of going on sale.

Different from the limited sales method commonly seen in domestic NFTs, there is another type of NFT transactions abroad that usually take the form of auctions.

Even traditional big-name auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s have put a lot of effort into the NFT market.

For example, in March this year, a digital painting made up of 5,000 images was sold for a sky-high price of more than 69 million US dollars (450 million RMB) .

Tim Berns-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, also made the source code of that year into NFT and sold it for US$5.4 million (RMB 35 million) .

The funniest thing is that even a 52-minute audio collection of fart sounds can be sold for $400.

In short, every NFT-related event will cause a lot of controversy.

Charles Allsopp, a former Christie's auctioneer, believes that buying virtual things is pointless.

Even the creator of the $69 million collage himself thinks that all this is just a bubble.

Have you ever grabbed the Alipay flying skin?

Or if you have any opinions on NFT, please leave a message.

Reference links:
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/27/boy-12-makes-29000-in-non-fungible-tokens-with-digital-whale-art
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/12-year-old-coder-made-6-figures-selling-weird-whales-nfts.html
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56371912