Benyamin Ahmed from London has created a series of pixelated artworks called Weird Whales and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and made about £290,000 during the school holidays. The 12-year-old boy is keeping his earnings in the form of Ethereum – the crypto-currency in which they were sold. In the case of hacking, there is no backup from the authorities if the digital wallet in which he is holding them. With NFTs, artwork can be “tokenized” to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold. They do not generally give the buyer the actual artwork or its copyright. Interestingly he never had a traditional bank account. He has many other hobbies as swimming, badminton, and taekwondo which he enjoys. He also made YouTube videos about his hobbies. He also encouraged other children and said, “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”. Benyamin’s father, Imran, is a software developer and works in traditional finance. Benyamin and his brother, Yousef, were encouraged to start coding at the ages of five and six by their father. Benyamin has had the advantage of a strong network of technology experts to help him in any matter. “It was a little bit of a fun exercise – but I picked up on really early that they were really receptive to it and they were really good,” Imran proudly said. The boys did 20 or 30 minutes of coding exercises a day to improve his skills without any holiday. While speaking about his collection Imran said, Weird Whales is Benyamin’s second digital-art collection, following an earlier Minecraft-inspired set that sold less well. Benyamin used his own program to create the set of 3,350 emoji-type whales, he drew inspiration from a pixelated whale meme image and a popular digital-art style. “It was interesting to see all of them hatch, as they appeared on my screen slowly generating,” he said. His father proudly told that Benyamin is already working on his third, superhero-themed collection. He is also interested to make an “underwater game” featuring the whales. On a question about the legality of his work and cryptocurrency laws, Imran said, his son has not broken copyright law and has engaged lawyers to “audit” his work, as well as getting advice on how to trademark his own designs. In the art world, everyone has their own views about the current trend for NFTs.While artists say they are a useful additional line of revenue. And if we talk about NFTs there are many impressive stories of high sales. But there is also suspicion over whether they are a real long-term investment. Former Christie’s auctioneer Charles Allsopp said buying them made “no sense”. “The idea of buying something which isn’t there is just strange,” he said earlier this year. “People who invest in it are slight mugs – but I hope they don’t lose their money.”