A 12-year-old kid coded his own NFT project and made $160K in a day — an interview.

Weird Whales

Benyamin (@ObiWanBenoni) is a 12-year-old coder who yesterday released his first NFT collectable project. The project sold out within a few hours at the base price of 0.025eth per collectable, 3350 whales in total.

The collection had already gained popularity through Benyamin’s twitter thread which he released shortly before the project launch, the thread briefly went over how he started his coding journey and his introduction to NFTs. The thread quickly spread through NFT Twitter thus putting a lot of eyes on the collection.

Here is his YouTube channel and Github.

After the complete sale of the collection the secondary market sales began to boom, word was going around in popular discord server’s, namely the CryptoPunks discord. The floor of the project had then reached close to 0.15eth per whale. At this moment there was a lot of conversation happening on Twitter and discord about the legitimacy of the creator’s claims of being 12 years old or whether someone was spoofing as the boy, scepticism was to be expected in the current market scape where new collectables are launched every day. This caused the floor to drop to 0.03eth.

Linked on Benyamin’s Twitter account were his GitHub repository and a YouTube channel, people were still sceptical as neither had been updated in a year thus making people think that someone was impersonating the kid.

It wasn’t until this morning that Benoni had released an update on his youtube channel proving that it was in fact him and not an impersonator, the video featured a picture of him sitting in front of a monitor displaying the weird whale’s website. The floor has now recovered to 0.18eth and the total volume of sales is over 500eth. What brought so much attention to this collection was the creator, being such a young creator is commendable.

A key thing to mention is that the team over at Boring Bananas helped Benyamin with the python script to put together traits, Vee helped Benyamin while he was setting up the whale project, and supported him all the way till launch.

I’ve interviewed him and this is what he had to say:

When did you start your coding journey?

I started coding around the ages of 5/6. My dad is a programmer so he spends a lot of time on his computer, so I just sit next to him using my laptop. I started with HTML, CSS and Bootstrap.

What led you to find out about NFTs?

OpenSea. I can’t remember how I exactly discovered it but I knew it was related to Bitcoin and Ethereum. My dad explained NFTs to me and his friend had bought some Rare Pepes.

How do you balance school and coding at home?

During the holidays, I'll try to complete one course on a topic. I have done the JavaScript course on FreeCodeCamp and during this holiday, I am doing the regex course on regexone.com. During school and holidays, I will try to complete at least one exercise on Codewars. I can usually get the 8 kyu done in 5 mins and the 7 kyu can take up to 30 mins.

Do you have a specific reason why you created an NFT project?

I created my first collection on OpenSea just for a bit of fun, and then I got more interested in them when BAYC and other avatar projects started coming. I also play a lot of games, so I can see NFTs becoming useful as custom skins and cosmetics. For the whales, I just wanted to play around with the generating images python script, I didn’t expect them to come out looking so clean and nice!

What was going through your head when you sold out and your thread went viral?

I felt too excited. I noticed sales started increasing as soon as Vee from Boring Bananas tweeted about it. I still didn't think that all would sell out on the same day.

What does the future hold for you in the NFT space?

I’ll be back at school soon, so I will have less time, but I would like to work on another project as a developer with an artist. I have some interesting ideas.

This article was written by Loopify & X12 — Join the discord if you liked this article, vibe and talk/learn about NFTs:

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