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Manila Bulletin devider Lifestyle devider LOOK: This 12-year-old coder's estimated earnings are P20M

LOOK: This 12-year-old coder's estimated earnings are P20M

Published Sep 2, 2021 09:18 am

Like father, like son. But for web developer Imran Ahmed, his son Benyamin has been doing more than what he ever did when he was a kid.

According to the CNBC report, Benyamin started programming with HTML and CSS, levelling up to JavaScript and other programs. He has now moved on to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and smart contracts or what we refer to as collection of codes, which all fall under cryptocurrency.

“I first learned about NFTs earlier this year,” the 12-year-old London-based boy tells CNBC Make It. “I got fascinated with NFTs because you can easily transfer the ownership of an NFT by the blockchain.”

And from there, he decided to create his own NFT collection. He launched his very first just this summer. It has 40 colorful and pixelized avatars which he calls Minecraft Yee Haa. "I created after spending too many hours playing Minecraft (the video game)," Benyamin said, adding that he created and coded each of the artwork.

This first collection didn't sell well, but, for him, this project was all about learning. And this didn't stop him from creating another collection. Just this June, he released his second NFT collection on Weird Whales. WIth 3,350 pixelated whales (no two whales are alike), he took inspiration from one of the very first NFT collections, CrptoPunks, that was released.

His investment for this? USD300 which went to paying gas fees that are charged to blockchain verification of each NFT. Plus, the time he spent learning how to code this special collection. Online tutorials, plus people he met on Discord communities (online messaging community application) who guided him all throughout this process. One of the developers even helped him by providing a template for coding.

"My brother and my dad were very excited and fascinated at how they came out. We did some work on the website and the smart contract and posted a thread on Twitter," Benyamin tells CNBC.

A very pleasant surprise was how his whole collection got sold out in nine hours. He made over 80 ether which is about USD255,000. He also earned an additional estimate of USD95,000 from the resale market. A royalty of 2.5% is made on reselling. To date, he has earned over USD350,000, with an estimate projection of earnings over USD400,000.

While the 12-year-old coder envisions a future where the regular bank account doesn't exist anymore. In fact, he doesn't even have a bank account. “I plan to keep all my ether and not convert it to fiat money. It might be early proof that, in the future, maybe everyone doesn’t a bank account and just has an ether address and a wallet.” But the current situation will have him open a bank account for tax purposes.

And for his next project? It will have a meme component, he says. "I think memes have significant value in this space, as a lot of projects have some kind of meme-link to it." And while he's working on this, his father will be working on his intellectual property rights to trademark Weird Whales.

“When people buy Weird Whales, they’re investing in me and my future. If I carry on as I’ve been, I might end up like other tech entrepreneurs out there like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos." The future is indeed bright for this tween boy, with proper guidance and support from his family and peers.

Related Tags

children parenting Weird Whales 12 years old Benyamin Ahmed NFT cryptocurrency
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