The Pomp Podcast - #651 Meet the 12-year old whiz kid selling NFTs

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Benyamin Ahmed is a 12-year old from London who has made more than $400,000 selling NFTs in the last few weeks. He is incredibly smart and was a joy to speak with.   In this conversation, we discuss NFTs, booking $400,000 in revenue, being 12 years old, teacher’s reaction, potentially buying the school and renaming it, and what Benyamin is planning next.  ======================= Okcoin is one of the most popular licensed exchanges. Okcoin is the first to bring new cryptos to market, offering some of the lowest fees in the industry, an easy to use app, and Earn feature--you got to check out their brand new, beautifully designed app! And as of today, they also became the first US exchange to list NEAR. It’s easier than ever to sign up, buy and trade crypto in just 2 minutes on Okcoin with credit & debit cards or just link your bank account to the best new crypto assets. So get started, and go to okcoin.com/pomp ======================= Cosmos is building the Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. Dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp  ======================= Matrixport, Asia’s fastest growing digital asset platform with $10 billion in assets under management and custody, it offers one-stop crypto financial solutions including fixed income, DeFi in 1-click, structured products, Cactus Custody™, spot OTC as well as lending. You can earn from high single digit with fixed income to high double digit yield with their Dual Currency Product. If you hold crypto and look for yield, this is the app you don’t wanna miss out. Go download the Matrixport App and enjoy a welcome offer of 30% APY on USDC here: https://invest.matrixport.com/en

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Benjamin Ahmed is a 12-year-old from London who has made more than $400,000 selling NFTs in the last few weeks. He's incredibly smart and was a joy to speak with. In this conversation, we discuss NFTs, booking $400,000 in revenue, being 12 years old, teacher's reaction, potentially buying the school and renaming it, and what Benjamin is planning next. I really enjoyed this conversation with him, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

First up is OKCoin. If you haven't started building your crypto portfolio on OKCoin, there's no better time. They're one of the fastest growing global exchanges around, and they have some promotions happening right now to help even more people be part of the future of finance. If you have an account already, you can split $100 in Bitcoin with a friend when you invite them to sign up for OKCoin if they buy $100 worth of crypto in the first month. The more friends you sign up and buy, the more Bitcoin you get. And I always recommend dollar-cost averaging as a way for investors to have more control

over their average price when building their portfolio. Now you can automate dollar-cost averaging with completely fee-free daily, weekly, or monthly recurring buys on OKCoin until November 1st. That's no fees at all on your purchases until the holidays. Get started on the web or on their new super easy to use app at okcoin.com slash POMP. Again, okcoin.com slash POMP. They're one of the fastest growing global exchanges around. okcoin.com slash POMP.

Go check them out. Next up is Cosmos. They're building the internet of blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. Dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network.pomp. Again, cosmos.network.pomp. The internet of blockchains marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability.

cosmos.network.pomp. Last but not least is Matrixport. Have you lost your way in this low-yield environment while searching for a better store of value to beat inflation? Look no further. Invest with Matrixport to get more out of your crypto. Invest today and earn up to 30% annualized yields. Matrixport is Asia's fastest-growing digital asset platform founded by crypto veterans Jihan Wu and John Ji.

With $10 billion in assets under management and custody, Matrixport offers one-stop crypto financial solutions including fixed income, DeFi in one click, structured products, cactus custody, spot OTC, and lending. You can earn from high single-digit with fixed income to high double-digit yield with dual-currency product. If you hold crypto and look for a yield, this app you don't want to miss. Go download the Matrixport app today by clicking on the link in

the description and enjoy a welcome offer of high yield on USDC for new users. Again, go to the description, click on the link there and download the app. You can also go to matrixport.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Benjamin. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Benjamin, what's up, man?

Hello. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing great. Where are you? Geography-wise, what city do you live in? I'm currently in London, UK. Amazing. All right. You're 12 years old, right? Yes. Man, I wish I was still 12. That's a fun time to be alive. All right. How did you first come across Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, etc.? So I got interested in NFTs earlier this year. My dad's friend, who's been in Bitcoin for a very

long time, bought a rare Pepe, which is one of the few NFT collections on the Bitcoin network, for $27,000. And I instantly became fascinated that someone was willing to spend this much money on a JPEG. So I did some research into NFTs. Dude, legend. All right. When you started looking at the NFTs, why were you so interested? You saw your dad's friend buy it for a lot of money and you obviously were probably laughing like, why are you buying a JPEG for tens of thousands of but why were you interested in it? In every industry, the digital format has massively outperformed the analog format. I don't think of entities as artwork. I don't think of them as digital artwork. I think of them as programmable digital artwork.

You are a legend. You're right. Yes, that is exactly what this is. All right. So once you decided that, which by the way, there's a ton of boomers on wall street that you need to go tell that too, because they're still confused. But once you decided that, what was the first thing that you did with nfts so i watched a few youtube tutorials about nfts and started work on my first collection called minecraft because i'm a big fan of minecraft i've been playing it for a long time and it consisted of 40 small minecraft characters um unfortunately i didn't sell any of them but i gave one away on twitter and then after that i wanted to enter the generative space in this nft sector so i started work on weird world okay so when you first started looking at nfts

the first thing that you did was you went you did a youtube tutorial is that where you normally learn is on youtube rather than in school yes all right which tells me i always say that youtube's better than regular school right i guess all right when you decided that you were going to do this did you tell any of your friends uh no i kept it secret at the time all right did you tell your dad yes what did your parents think when you told them that you were going to go sell jpegs on the internet well my dad was quite interested i have to say so he got it right away as well yes okay and then when you went and what was the first one that you actually sold i think there There's about 40 of them in the NFT collection?

Yes. In my first collection, the Minecraft Beehive, I didn't sell any of them, but I gave one away. Okay. And then the second collection, what did you do? So in the second collection, it was automatically generated. So I fed all the traits and base layers into an open source Python script, which generated all of my 3,350 whales. I then started work on a smart contract, as it's quite easy with a smart contract. you just look at the standard smart contract that the other nft collections have used and just

change the variables so when it says the maximum supply of tokens you change that to your maximum supply the hard and difficult bit which i needed my dad to help me was when you connected the smart contract to the website so that's one thing that my dad helps me on at the end and then i then posted a thread on twitter on how i was able to do this and i had not that many followers at the time but i think another nft collection retweeted it and the thread just blew up it went viral people just connected with my story because i was so young benjamin are you gonna come on my show and flex on me and tell everyone that you're smarter than me that was incredible all right so how many nfts have you actually sold right now do you know what the number is i sold all of the

3,350 on the mint. And then I think we've done over 1.6K volume trading in ETH on secondary sales. Okay. In dollar terms, how much money have you made so far? I've made 400,000 US dollars. Legend. All right. Your friends know about this now? I kept it secret, but when a major outlet in the uk um wrote a story about it literally all my friends just found out and started making jokes i was able to buy the school we made the same jokes oh yeah i saw that yeah all right so what do your friends say like when they first read the story you're 12 years old do your friends call you text you they come over to your house like what like what do they react when they find out that you're richer than some of their parents well they're quite shocked that i made four

hundred thousand dollars from selling JPEGs online. All right. And then when your parents find out that you've made all this money, what do they think? Well, it was just all meant to be a learning experience. I was, I just expected to make like 20 pounds from this. I never expected to make $400,000 and neither did my parents. All right. And so you got paid in ETH? Yes. All right. Did you sell the ETH? Are you keeping it in ETH? Are you moving it to something else? what are you doing with what you got? Uh, I'm keeping it in East and I'm hodling. Wow. Okay. And when you look at the volumes of the secondary market, are you paying attention or doing anything with that collection or you're kind of just letting it run now?

So I'm letting it run now and then I do some changes to the website. So I think a few days ago I changed the gradient on the weird wealth text on the website. So I just do small changes here and then. All right. Now here's the big question. When that article came out and they said that you had made $400,000 selling this on the internet, what did your teachers in principle at school say? Well, one of my teachers messaged me and said that they were surprised and couldn't wait to see me in September when I go back to school. Wow. That teacher may be asking you for a job soon all right so can we can we uh talk to you about an idea that we have um yeah sure we think that you should take twenty thousand dollars and buy the school we think that we

should buy your school and just name it benjamin school moving forward what do you think that's an interesting idea i have to say are you interested what what if we together what if we together you put 20 000 up we put 20 000 up and we buy your school and rename it after you what would your teacher say then uh i'm not sure to be honest um they might be shocked we for 50 000 they may make you the principal true all right so talk to us about what are your plans moving forward what are you going to do are you going to do another nft drop are you going to do something else in the space what are you thinking now so i don't want to be known as the weird wealth kid for the rest of my life i don't want to be a one-hit wonder you are a long-term thinker okay in the

future i want to do an infrastructure business which is where the opportunities are at how with my brother who's also an amazing coder however in the meantime i'm working on small nft collections to get some experience okay where is uh how old is your brother he's one year older than me so you're 12 he's 13 yes what do you guys eat for dinner what are your parents feeding you why are you guys so smart um well i have normal food i guess what questions do you have for benjamin benjamin uh thanks for doing this nice to meet you you're great dude you're awesome we love you if you ever come to america you have to come see us yeah i i could learn a lot from you. It seems, um, speaking of what are you learning in school? Like I was looking up the

other day when we were talking about you on the show and I made a comment, like when I looked it up, it said decimals and percentages and negative numbers. Like you, it seems like, you know, all that. So like what's happening in the class, are you paying attention or are they teaching you new things? What's going on there? Um, I'm paying attention. Uh, yeah, I have to, uh, apart from that um school has been interesting i do not learn coding at school most of that was mainly taught to me by my dad at home what do they teach you in math class right now is it decimals and stuff yeah it's decimals i think we did like nth term before we went on break summer holidays man you guys do it in terms of that's why i mean it's crazy it seems like what you're saying is

you've learned more from youtube and at home from your dad than you're necessarily learning in school that's a fair point yeah john what questions you got john and you are about the same age benjamin just kidding kidding benjamin it's nice to meet you thank you for coming on the show you are an absolute legend in my mind um one i love how you're going after like the infrastructure don't want to be a one-hit wonder genius genius but can you i'm just curious can you confirm something did your weird whale sell out in nine hours yes three thousand over three thousand jpegs you sold nine hours yes are your friends like asking to go to dinner and stuff like are they like hitting you up like hey man when are we gonna go out what's what's going on there what are they

saying uh i think they regard me as their jpeg dealer from now on that's what that's your nickname in the halls of uh school is the jpeg dealer yeah did you buy anything once that you made the money did you even buy like anything a pair of shoes anything for yourself uh i treated myself with a few really cheap nfts but apart from that i'm trying to keep my money in crypto and not spend it so you well hold on a second back up you made four hundred thousand dollars worth of uh eth have cryptocurrency and you didn't take a single piece of that money and buy anything in the analog world you simply bought a couple other nfts in the digital world and that's it yeah and it's surprising but i don't have a bank account yet because you're too young uh i think i

can get one but i've never gone to register because you don't need it right yes i'm bankless the 12 year old who made $400,000 and he's bankless. I love it. Has any of the bankers called you yet? Do you, are the wealth managers calling you up like, yo kid, I got some ideas for you. I've got a few requests and my DMS in discord, but apart from that, not really amazing. And then what you talked about infrastructure, what do you think the opportunity is for infrastructure? Like you want to build like an exchange or what do you want to do?

So when I look at NFTs in the digital art scene, to me, they come in three groups. So the first group is arts that people are willing to spend loads on. So this is like CryptoPunks and Artblocks. This artwork outlines the crypto renaissance. The second group is artwork which will turn into billion dollar brands. For example, Cool Cats, Board Apes, these will expand into merchandise, games, and a whole host of other sectors. And the last group is NFTs that are really cheap but have a lot of utility. So this is NFTs like avatar pictures and skins and cosmetics in different games and weapons.

And I think in this group is where a billion-dollar infrastructure business lies. I like that idea. can i can i make a deal with you uh if you want if you start a company can i invest uh sure all right we'll talk later but if you do something i'll invest i don't know if you'll be successful or not but it sounds like you're smarter than me so i'm in all right joe and john you guys got any other questions no you're a legend benjamin thanks for doing this keep it up benjamin we're going to bring you back on this show i feel like you're going to do other crazy stuff we're going to have to keep bringing you back are you on twitter

yeah yeah what's your username at ob1 bononi why why did you pick that name that's an awesome name you're you look at the photo pictures all the time benjamin the photo makes you immediately if i see that photo on twitter i'm like this guy's a g he's locked and loaded why'd you pick ob1 bononi so as soon as i was born i don't know why but my family nicknamed me bononi And then a few years ago, my brother came across the screen named Obi-Wan Bononi and he told me about it. So I just adopted that as my username on every single platform I go on. So in games, I'm at Obi-Wan Bononi and on Twitter, I'm at Obi-Wan Bononi. So that's why I chose it mainly.

That's amazing. And is your brother doing NFT drops too or it's just you? My brother's not doing NFT. However, he's an amazing coder just like me. We've both been coding from a very young age. he's less he's more shy on social media and these platforms however he's just he's just as a good coder as me oh i love it i love that you're supporting your brother too all right last question i saw somebody asking in the comments are girls coming after you no do you got like a whole line a list of uh of people who want to be your girlfriend now uh well the thing about my dms i've closed them to only people that i follow so i don't really follow that many oh you're not

even worried about local school you're like he's global he's global obi-wan bononi is absolutely global gotta close the dms all right is what can we do to help you right now is there anything that we can do other than tell people to go follow you on twitter um i think uh you allowing me to come on this show has just helped me a lot to be honest oh you listen you have open invitation whenever you do anything you can come on the show people love you we love you and we're gonna uh next time that we talk you're going to tell me what company you're going to build i'm going to invest and then i'm going to go brag to everyone that i invested in a 12 year old that's smarter than me and my brothers sound good yeah all right buddy thank you so much oh by the way hold on i

just put uh in the chat i just put your twitter account so everyone go follow them but is there anywhere that we should send them to see your collection on open somewhere yeah you could send them the OpenSea link. You search up Weird Whales and it's the one with the flashy gif. Weird Whales. Sorry, hold on. I'm going to do it right now. Weird Whales on OpenSea? Yeah. I just dropped in the chat for everyone his link tree. Ooh,

John. We got Weird Whales. I'm going to put that in the chat as well. Why did you think of Weird Whales? Why did you come up with that name? So most of the collection I've seen, they have their, whatever their NFT is and then adjectives before it. So you have cool cats and they've got cool as the

adjective and i thought of an adjective beginning with w and the first one that came to mind was weird that's why i went with it i like it i like it i like it well guess what you know who else liked it the audience because you sold four hundred thousand dollars absolutely legend when's your birthday by the way when do you turn 13 uh my birthday's on march the 9th all right so it's coming up here in a few months can we get can i give you a challenge uh sure you're at four hundred thousand dollars in sales now can you get to a million before 13 i'm hoping i can all right because then you could tell your brother that you were a millionaire before 13 and he wasn't that's an interesting flex

listen i i'm too old to try to do that so you uh you're my last hope all right so a million dollars by the time you turn 13 or i'm sorry yeah 13 in uh march that's the goal yeah uh you got this man we're cheering you on everyone make sure you go follow him on twitter make sure you go check out open sea john dropped the link tree in there uh any last words benjamin um thanks for having me on the show you're a legend man all right we're definitely going to bring you back on we'll talk later but i appreciate you coming on tell your dad thank you and uh tell your brother let's go we uh we got two uh two geniuses you guys are the true super coders by the way in the u.s they say that's a bad thing and in my eyes that's a good thing so keep it up you're doing

a great job thank you all right see you later buddy see you later bye bye