This Coder Is 12 and in Two Months His NFTs Have Made Almost $400,000

A 12-year-old schoolboy coded an NFT collection during his summer holidays, making huge sums of money, and becoming a media sensation. BSC.News takes a closer look at how he did it and how you can too.

Weird Whales

A schoolboy from north London has coded an NFT collection that has already earned close to $400,000. Benyamin Ahmed’s NFT collection of ‘Weird Whales’ shares similarities to Crypto Punks, but replaces the punk rockers with kawaii crypto whales. Each of the 3,350 programmatically generated cetaceans has unique attributes which help to make the artwork collectible and rare.

The project’s success has won the young boy a barrage of positive press coverage worldwide. However, Ahmed seems to be taking the attention in his stride, demonstrating an old head on young shoulders as he offers advice to others who may seek to follow his success. 

“My advice to other children that maybe want to get into this space is don’t force yourself to do coding, maybe because you get peer pressured – just as if you like cooking, do cooking, if you like dancing, do dances, just do it to the best of your ability,” he told the BBC on August 27th.

Wise words from the young boy whose summer holiday hobby has now been featured in The New York Times, Business Insider, CNBC, The Telegraph, ITV News, BBC, Mirror, NY Post, Bitcoin.com, and Decrypt to name just a few.

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Making Whales From Bananas

While the graphical stylings of Weird Whales have drawn comparisons to Crypto Punks, the project shares more than a little coding DNA with Boring Bananas. When Ahmed first started creating NFTs he would first draw an image in Photoshop before converting it into an NFT. The process was tedious and labor-intensive. 

His father, Imran, a web engineering lead at the London Stock Exchange, first suggested that he use a python script to automate the process. 

“So, I researched into that and found “Boring Bananas,” another NFT collection, which had released all their code. And I managed to use their code to create 3,350 ‘Weird Whales,’” Benyamin told Business Insider on August 21st.

The team at Boring Bananas were more than happy to help the boy, with Vee, a member of their digital research team, sending the budding coder the necessary scripts he needed. Boring Bananas also helped Ahmed when he’d finished the project, with retweets that helped Weird Whales to gain early momentum.

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Become an NFT Artist

The success of Benyamin Ahmed’s Weird Whales may encourage other artists and programmers to try their hand at making NFT collections of their own. To find out more, we spoke with Pepecasso, the artistic mind behind Catshit Crazy and Non-Fungible Frens. We asked what wisdom he could offer to other aspiring creators.

“My advice is to have fun with it and to try to build a community around that. When you have a loving community, they will support you. Start small and see how it goes, and then build up to bigger projects over time. If you have talent and can keep it real, the chances are that you will find your audience, and people will want to own your NFTs,” he told BSC.News.

On the programming side, Vee at Boring Bananas was on hand once more to provide some great insights. In a Twitter thread in June, the helpful ape outlined the six-step processes for creating programmatically created NFTs.

Decide on a concept and perform market validation

Have an amazing team of artists to bring the concept to life

Save each individual art asset as a separate file

Use a script to generate composites (Vee recommends Python)

Refine that script to limit the number of potential NFTs

Use script to ensure no duplicate NFTs and… render imag

Vee went on to add that for anyone interested in the source code, the full GitHub repository of Boring Bananas is available on Discord.

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NFTs Doing Well

The NFT market is currently in great health. Data from Non-Fungible.com shows that monthly primary sales figures are currently approaching levels not seen since May, the previous high watermark for the industry. 

With positive news stories like Benyamin Ahmed’s in mainstream media, and with the wider crypto industry performing well, NFT collectibles appear to have a bright future ahead of them. Becoming a successful NFT artist may not be easy, but for those with artistic talent and coding skills, there’s never been a better time to try than now.

Source : bsc.news