Weird Whales is a collection of 3350 8-bit style digital whales on the Ethereum blockchain created by 12-year-old Benyamin Ahmed.^[1][2]

After launching in July 2021, the entire collection sold out in nine hours and went viral across the web.^[3]

Overview

3350 whales have been developed programmatically, each with its own set of qualities and traits. Weird Whales began when Vishesh Sood, one of the developers behind another alliterative NFT project, Boring Bananas Company, sent Benyamin Ahmed, a 12-year-old founder of Whales collection, an annotated Python script with a template for creating his own tiered images.^[4] Ahmed learned how to code the collection from online tutorials and mentors he met on Discord communities.^[5][6]

The collection 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.^[3][6]

After launching in July 2021, the entire collection sold out in nine hours, and Ahmed made over 80 ETH ($150,000 at the time of sale) in one day. He then earned an additional 30 ETH from the resale market, since Ahmed earns a 2.5% royalty on each secondary sale.^[5][7]

Founder

Benyamin Ahmed is a 12-year-old teen enjoying swimming, taekwondo, and learning how to code. At 5 years old, Ahmed began programming after watching his father, Imran, work as a web developer. He started with HTML and CSS, and continued to advance his coding skills, later learning JavaScript and other programs. But in 2021, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and the smart contracts, or collections of code, that power them, have caught Ahmed's attention.^[5]
Ahmed, who is based in London, told CNBC Make It:

“I first learned about NFTs earlier this year. I got fascinated with NFTs because you can easily transfer the ownership of an NFT by the blockchain.”^[5]

Ahmed was excited by the technology and decided to create an NFT collection of his own. His first NFT collection, which he launched in summer 2021, consists of 40 colorful, pixelized avatars called Minecraft Yee Haa, that he had created after spending too many hours playing Minecraft. He created the artwork and coded each himself. The collection didn’t immediately sell, and Ahmed saw the project as more of a learning experience wanted to continue to create. In June 2021, he began to code Weird Whales, his second NFT collection, which features 3,350 pixelated whales, each with distinct traits. The project uses the image of a whale, with traits similar to that of the iconic pixelated Cryptopunks, one of the first NFT collections to exist.^[5][8]

As of now, Ahmed doesn’t have a traditional bank account, only a cryptocurrency wallet. He said:

“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 [need] a bank account and just has an ether address and a wallet.”^[5]

Going forward, Ahmed is working on another NFT project.^[5]

Notable Sales

On July 20, 2021, Weird Whales 1250 sold for 3 ETH ($5,000 at the time of sale). On August 24, 2021, Weird Whales 76 sold for 3 ETH ($9,500). As of August 26, 2021, the floor price of Weird Whales on OpenSea was 0.29 ETH ($900).^[9]