The Pomp Podcast - #915 Benyamin On Becoming A 13 Year Old Crypto Millionaire

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 today's episode is with a 12 year old no seriously his name's benyamin i'm not telling you his last name to protect his real identity but he's the founder of weird whales and in this conversation we talk about how a 12 year old went out and made millions of dollars in the nft space It gives us an update on weird whales and also tells us about what's going on in the NFT world. I always enjoy talking to Benjamin, and I hope that you guys enjoy this episode as well. Before we get into it, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:02:59 Go check them out at Bullish.com or follow at Bullish on Twitter. All right, let's get in this episode. 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

Starting point is 00:03:24 personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, back by popular demand, our favorite 12-year-old in the entire world, Benjamin. Benjamin, how are you? Hi, I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. I have a couple questions are you still 12 years old 13 now you're getting older man all right 13 years old that means we just up our expectations of what you're gonna do in the world uh give us an update last time we talked you had launched uh weird whales and you had made a couple hundred thousand dollars uh in doing so i have heard through the internet that things have gotten much much better what's going on with weird whales so a little status on weird whales so the project has now

Starting point is 00:04:17 traded around 2000 eth which is over five million dollars and the mind-blowing thing is that it only cost me around 300 to build using open source software are you out here flexing are you flexing on people saying they only spent 300 and you had five million dollars of trading in weird whales yes all right and so when you think of it why why are you still working on this like like what are you learning why is this interesting to you nfts are just we're only at the start of a 10-year revolution that 99 of nft use cases are waiting to be discovered so it might seem completely out this world that monkey jpegs are selling for millions of dollars but the real use cases will come in five to ten years from now and i'm here with nfts to stay all right and i know that you're

Starting point is 00:05:17 working on a whole bunch of different stuff and now like i feel like you're kind of like me right like you started trying to do something it started to work you put some more effort in it worked a little bit more then you're like all right this might really work now you got five million dollars of trading volume you're probably the richest 13 year old in the entire world the whole nine yards uh and so now you've started to think about like well what else can i do before we talk about that did you take a run at naming your school after yourself do you remember last time we talked have you looked into that at all i have had shower thoughts about it but i haven't really gone ahead with it you had shower thoughts about naming the school after yourself yes

Starting point is 00:05:56 you should just do it you should do it how much would it cost you should you should go talk to the principal and say, Hey, I'd like to make a donation to the school. How much would I have to donate in order to change the name of the school? And then once you get that number, DM me on Twitter and we'll figure out, maybe we'll, uh, we'll chip in a whole $3 to, uh, alongside your 250 grand to rename the school. If you give them 300, you might turn into 5 million in trading. Yeah. Or we'll invest $300 and you give us 5 million back. Yeah. I'd love to do that. But the surprising thing is that school fees are basically the amount of money i made last year all right talk to me about these non-fungible films what is that

Starting point is 00:06:39 i know that's something that you're like you're super interested in yes so i'm working on a few projects right now and i'll talk about two of them one is non-fungible films and it's changing the way consumers engage with entertainment and it's just disrupting hollywood we have a licensing agreement with two collections one is nf heroes which is another nft collection i worked on with the designer from marvel and 80 board apes to create an animated series and this week we also announced our board and included two former studio heads from companies like cbs and xbox and also the head of a fund which has raised millions from a16z and i think yeah we're minting our mint pass on april the 25th and there's lots of stuff happening over all right

Starting point is 00:07:34 hold on back up for a second so non-fungible film you basically went and you signed licensing deals with some board apes you signed some licensing deals uh with these other collections you literally built a board of intelligent adults who now work for you basically and you're going to create films using the iep from these collections yes so i'm a web3 advisor on that project and it was started i didn't start up the project originally it was started up by a hollywood actor cameron mulan got it and yeah and so when you think of that when you think of that the idea is the final product is going to be a movie using the intellectual property from these collections Yes. So we aim to do movies, TV series, branch out into gaming.

Starting point is 00:08:21 I got it. Okay. And then talk to me about this second idea, this like FinTech, work in FinTech. Yes. So I'm also working on work in FinTech and it's a corporate sponsorship scheme. So I'm working with Ying Chao, who's the former head of digital at Barclays Bank. and the overall aim is to sell nfts to corporate clients and then use that money to educate young people about web3 and fintech and then shift them off to high paying jobs in the crypto space bro did you hear what he just said he's gonna take nfts he's gonna go to the corporations and he's gonna say i'm 13 years old i want to sell you an nft and the corporations will be like oh we have to do good in the world okay how much is it it's gonna be some astronomical price

Starting point is 00:09:09 he's going to sell it to the corporations he calls it a corporate sponsorship scheme so you immediately know that he's scheming and he's going to take that money and he could pocket it which all of us would be like wow you duped the corporations but instead they're going to take it and they're going to help these young people by help fund a whole bunch of different things to launch careers in the crypto sphere and so literally he's like robin hood yeah he's literally modern day he's raiding the corporate coffers and leaving them a little instead of a candy on the pillow at the hotel he's leaving them an nft he's taking the money he's gonna go help young kids start look at his face he's like that's exactly what i'm doing yeah we already have some big names

Starting point is 00:09:52 on board can you don't tell me any of the names i feel like you're not allowed to say the names yet or are you i can't say anything yet all right that's fine uh all right now all this is like pretty crazy right so you launch your nft project you've done five million dollars in volume you're doing the film as an advisor you've got the scheme to uh to separate corporations from their cash the whole thing and then he's 13 he went he spoke at oxford and he was the youngest speaker in almost a thousand years at oxford to me that's ever a thousand years i just say that's ever what did you talk about at oxford i talked about my art journey in the crypto and nft space and it was an amazing experience the audience was really receptive what were they like hey can i get a

Starting point is 00:10:40 job were they asking you to come work for you well maybe i had some in my dms after but my dms after can you imagine you work your ass off your entire life you get all the way to oxford and then you literally go to a speech and afterwards you're like damn i'm about to dm a 13 year old for a job yeah that's a testament to you right that literally age doesn't matter we talked about this last time like age does not matter as long as you can provide value to the world you can do anything right yes all right then then after oxford you know that wasn't enough in 900 a thousand years he's the youngest speaker ever uh you went to nfc summit in london what uh what was that yes so it was in lisbon actually and it was my first conference and it was an

Starting point is 00:11:33 amazing experience i also talked about my art journey in the nft space there as well and i was the youngest speaker there as well surprisingly joe john what questions you guys got is this what you want to do when you get older like what was your plan beforehand i i assume that maybe at some point you thought about what you would want to do when you get older and nfts uh obviously haven't been around for for 13 years or so long uh how has that changed and is this what you want to do now so i i'm just interested in programming i've been programming since the age of five my dad would often come home bring out his laptop and start coding and he realized that we were curious so he started teaching us and that led me to the nft space and i absolutely love nfts

Starting point is 00:12:22 and I definitely want to stick close to NFTs and crypto in the long term. John, what questions you got? Benjamin, can you help me understand the utility NFT stuff makes sense to me? Can you understand all this hype around the Bored Apes and all these like cultural NFTs? Yeah, so I've thought about this. And with art, it's always about the artist or the story behind the art. So there was a painting called The Bridge by Robert Reimer, and it sold for around 20 million dollars and it was just a blank white canvas and it's easy to say

Starting point is 00:12:57 oh i could just do that but it was the artist and the story behind painting a blank white canvas that attracted the buyers and this is similar to nft art as well most artworks get sold because of the story behind the art or the artist with the board apes the story was there were all these crypto whales they had lots of their time on their hands and lots of money and buying into a broad eight would help you connect with other crypto whales and give you access to events and it's membership club and that's why most people buy into these collections so tell me about the nft market in general you guys want a little surprise yeah let's hear it a little surprise benjamin and i've been we've been cooking in the kitchen we've been cooking we've been cooking up some stuff

Starting point is 00:13:43 Yeah, we haven't been scheming ourselves. We're going to separate you two from the show. No, I'm just joking. What we're going to do is we're going to bring him on like every other week or so. And he's going to give us just an update on what the hell is going on here. So what is going on in the NFT world right now? I don't spend any time on NFT. So you're going to be my expert.

Starting point is 00:14:03 NFTs are still booming and it's still very, very early. So on today's show, I want to look at three statistics from OpenSea, which is the largest NFT platform. The first one is dollar sales volume. Second one is NFT sold. And then I'll finish on active traders. All right. So I'll have a look at dollar sales volume first.

Starting point is 00:14:25 OpenSea sales volume in March 2022 was $2.5 billion. Yes, billion, not million. And back last year in March 2021, it was $150 million. So it's done a 15x in one year. And surprisingly, March 2022 is actually quite low compared to January 2022. The OpenSea sales volume in January was $5 billion, double the sales volume in March. And January 2022 was the highest ever sales volume OpenSea has ever seen. That's wild. Yeah. He's like, yeah, that is real wild. All right. What's the next one? So I'll have a look at NFT sold now. The amount of NFT sold in

Starting point is 00:15:16 March was 1.8 million. In March of 2021? 2022. Okay. And that was quite low compared to January, which was 2.5 million. And that was the highest amount of NFTs ever sold on OpenSea. And January was the first time OpenSea did more than 2.5 million sales. Got it. So if we think about this, in March of 2021, there's 150 million in sales. By a year later, March of 2022, there was 2.5 billion. But even though there was that massive increase,

Starting point is 00:15:51 there was still 2.5 million sales in January of 2022. But by March, it's down to 1.8. So even though it's going down, there's still this massive growth year over year. Yes. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's really crazy. All right, what's the last one?

Starting point is 00:16:08 Active traders is the last one. So in March 2022, there were 450,000 active traders. And that's nothing. Compare that to the 20 million traders using Robinhood or the hundreds of millions of Marvel and Disney fans. NFTs were still early days. so 450 000 active traders uh in the month of march and if you compare that to you know coinbase or whatever uh it's still a very small number yes yeah it's pretty crazy what what's going on with

Starting point is 00:16:44 your friends any of your friends into this stuff not really they don't really talk about it much but congratulated me at the time yeah no they want to tell everyone that they know you probably yeah yeah what about your brother your how old your brother my brother's one year older than me so he's 14 what's he doing yeah so we're both devs we're both programmers we've both been coding from a very young age i think i was five and he was six when we started coding and he's just as good developer as me if not better and in the long term i want to do an infrastructure business with my brother, which is where the real opportunities are at. Yeah, I'm already an investor in that one.

Starting point is 00:17:27 Remember, I told you I'm in. Are you going to do it? Well, I'm not going to focus too much on the business ideas. If you try to think of one, you always think of rubbish ones. I'm just going to keep on learning, keep on programming, and hopefully a problem will come to me that I can solve. All right. When you find the problem, then you're going to call me, right?

Starting point is 00:17:46 Yes. Because you know why I want to invest? Why? One, I want you to be successful. Right. I think it would be cool and life changing for you and your brother and all that. But two is I want to go tell all my friends I back the 13 year old. We took over the world. Y'all stupid. Right. I feel like there's a lot of things that go into building a company that if you're 13, you actually have an advantage over older people.

Starting point is 00:18:15 Like you could call up any CEO and say, hey, I'm 13. I have my own business. i'd like to come meet with you to talk about you know abc uh d thing and there's a lot of ceos be like what like yeah let's go set up the meeting right and they would take it because they would want to meet you just as much as you want to meet them yeah it's the age is a really big thing that's what caught all the headlines that i was in and all the media coverage i got yeah how much money you made on this stuff now are you allowed to say well so i've made money from originally selling out on weird wells and then working on other nft collections i've also made money but most of my money's come from that the fact that ethereum's price is going up rapidly

Starting point is 00:18:58 well it was going up rapidly and i'm probably if i sold all my nfts at the high end sold all my crypto at a good price i'll probably sit and be sitting on around one million dollars damn so you're a millionaire you're a 13 year old millionaire yeah you're an inspiration to all of all the other 13 year olds and also your teachers at school probably like damn this kid got more cash than me how do i do it yeah have any of them asked you what have any of them asked you what they should do yeah so i think i was waiting in the car park at the end of the day to get picked up and one of my teachers just told me that they invested i think some money and have already made uh 50 like 500 pounds they were absolutely mind-blowing yeah and then you were

Starting point is 00:19:48 like that's jump change kid right you're like you're like now the tables have turned teacher benjamin what did you do when you figured out you were worth a million dollars so i haven't really been gone like flexing everyone twitter i just want to stay humble and keep on learning i like that somebody uh somebody in the chat said uh benjamin stole your girl all right buddy anything else that you got for us yes so the last section i want to talk about is three stories in the nft space that caught my attention oh please tell me the three stories but before i go into that i want to just share a bit of alpha with you all today please you go you go alpha leak on them you go alpha leak on the audience yes damn you're gonna

Starting point is 00:20:43 be the favorite guest there's nobody else that comes on here so i'm gonna give you guys some alpha go ahead what's the alpha okay prepare to be mind blown so if you bought a broad ape for 200 and then collected all the subsequent airdrops like the dogs and the mutant apes and the recent ApeCoin token, you would be sitting on an invest on a return of over half a million dollars. And that's at the low end. Don't forget that some of these rare apes have sold for millions of dollars. And that probably makes Bored Apes the best investment in history. So basically, the idea is, if you bought the actual asset itself, then you got airdropped everything else. And that led to a huge financial gain for the people who had held it. And then

Starting point is 00:21:30 also there was appreciation of the ape itself yes yeah that's pretty crazy i feel like people don't understand the airdrops what do you think about airdrops yeah i think airdrops are good free money free money is always good but that's what the socialists say too the thing is um the holders of these apes are not only airdrops money but also knowledge and sensors getting these new tokens the eight point token the new nfts they taught people in a way about erc20s and erc721s and different contracts so that was also another side to it yeah it's uh it's pretty crazy how you get uh um the airdrops but also uh can you stake nfts are people doing that yet yeah some collections you can't stake you stake it and then uh what about like fractional

Starting point is 00:22:26 uh components of it the people have done that yes so i think there is um one company that specializes in fractionalizing your nfts so you can have one nft split into 40 different nfts and sell that off to different people and then lastly is uh are people lending against them yet there must be some people that are lending against it but i haven't heard of anyone yeah Yeah, definitely somebody's got to be lending against it, right? There's no way that people have millions of dollars worth of NFTs and they're not trying to get some kind of loan using it as collateral. I would imagine. Right, John?

Starting point is 00:23:06 Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. The fractional ownership stuff's cool. You like that? Well, they do it in assets today, right? Traditional assets today, right? Trading cards, jerseys, sporting goods, memorabilia, anything, right? it's fractional ownership and a rare thing yeah i agree um the uh somebody in the chat said if

Starting point is 00:23:26 anyone here loses money then they can tell their lawyer that they uh lost money taking financial advice from a 13 year old yeah this is this isn't financial advice no financial i said in the chat very specifically nothing we say is financial advice yeah well we actually don't have advice at all yeah we just like to have fun on the internet benjamin what what uh what time is it there 5 20 5 20 so so we do this at like noon every other week we're gonna be good is after school yes all right perfect i finished school at i think four o'clock at four o'clock yeah the well you gotta tell you gotta tell the teachers hey i gotta i gotta go i gotta get out of here i gotta go on the best business show and then get them all to watch right and then they'll be

Starting point is 00:24:05 sitting there and they'll be teaching you about things during the day and then at five o'clock you'll be teaching them things about how to make money i'm shocked that more teachers don't ask you well yeah they they don't really talk about it much well if i if i was a 45 year old teacher and a 13 year old had a million bucks it was in my class i probably wouldn't talk about it either you walk in the teacher's conference room and they're like he did what they probably want to know how to make money too that's what i'm saying i'm i'm shocked that more especially the younger teachers aren't asking him how to do it or what they should think about, or, you know, can you explain NFTs to the class?

Starting point is 00:24:46 I'm surprised no one gave you money and was like, Hey, can you turn this into more money, please? You want the teachers to convince them to start a fund? I'm surprised no one tried to convince them to take it. I don't know. Have you told your classmates about NFTs? Well, as I said before, they didn't talk about it much, but at the time they did ask me, Oh, what is this? and then i would explain it and then they're like okay but i don't think they understood it

Starting point is 00:25:12 yeah well and also i i guess part of it too is uh uh they got to have interest from like a technical standpoint that makes sense all right listen i'm super excited i i feel uh i don't know why but i feel proud of you like i i feel like you've done a great job and you continue to kind of push forward you're still learning you're doing a lot of different stuff uh you and your brother are are enjoying it are you doing this with uh your your dad and your mom and everything they're excited about this too yeah they're also excited my dad's gonna keep on teaching me and we're gonna keep on doing our coding challenges and my mom's gonna keep on supporting me yeah your dad gives you coding challenges yes so there's a website online called code wars and every day we do one

Starting point is 00:25:59 coding challenge on that website oh wow and uh who's better you or your brother well we've had this debate before and i think kind of we kind of settled it that we're both as good as each other uh yeah that sounds like a cop-out answer yeah well my brother this you know these are my brothers right and there's two more so there's five of us total if we ever had a debate about who was better at coding we would have punched each other or don't do that don't hit your brother that's bad your parents will be mad don't uh don't do that uh i'd still be john's butt though everyone would just say they're the best yeah of course well i am the best so i would be telling the truth you guys would be lying all right benjamin listen thank you so much for coming on i'm super excited

Starting point is 00:26:42 we're gonna be doing this uh every other week or so and uh you know the audience when you said you had alpha to leak they got super excited so maybe we'll uh we'll come back with some more uh some more ideas when you come back next time. Do you mute yourself? Yeah. All right, buddy. Sounds good. See you later. See you later. Bye. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with

Starting point is 00:27:25 over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.

The Pomp Podcast - #915 Benyamin On Becoming A 13 Year Old Crypto Millionaire

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