The Launch
Summer 2021
From bedroom coder to viral sell-out in a single afternoon.
Before The Wave
12 years old. Coding since 5. A big fan of Pokémon and games like Minecraft and Fortnite.
When I was 5, my dad, a software engineer, would often come home from work, pull out his laptop and start coding. Me and my brother were curious as to what he was doing, so he eventually started teaching us the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I finished freeCodeCamp's JavaScript course before my 10th birthday, then started on a daily coding regime, completing a Codewars kata every day, in which I now rank 3 kyu - which represents the top 0.43% of developers on the platform.
In the run-up to the summer holidays of 2021, I came across the world of NFTs through my dad's friend. He had been a big and early investor in Bitcoin, and I found out that he had just spent $27,000 on an NFT known as a Rare Pepe. I was shocked at the time to learn that someone was willing to spend that much money on what seemed to me like just a JPEG. I started learning about the technology, and it taught me a lot about the future of digital ownership and how it could extend beyond art to power the digital property rights of the entire internet.
I figured the best way to really learn was to build in the space and gain real experience, so I created 40 hand-made Minecraft-inspired pixel-art characters and manually uploaded them to OpenSea. I didn't sell any, but it taught me how the NFT ecosystem worked end-to-end: smart contracts, marketplaces, community, metadata. Everything I learned went straight into what came next.
The Launch Thread
The thread that put the project on the map.
On launch day I posted a 10-tweet thread breaking down exactly how I built the collection. It went viral within hours, amassing over 2k likes. The original mint site is still preserved at weirdwhalesnft.com.
(For those that don't know, I'm 12 and still at school 🏫).
https://opensea.io/Benoni
@BoringBananasCo Github Repository
@BoringBananasCo Twitch videos
Bulma for styling website
Vercel tutorials for deploying website
@Replit - favourite online code editor.
Deploy contract: $124
Set base URI on contract: $3
Mint tokens for #NFTGiveaways: 0.25 Ξ (Gas: 14 Gwei)
Purchasing domain name: $80
If you found this thread helpful, please:
1. Retweet the 1st tweet 🔥
2. Feel free to follow @ObiWanBenoni 👍✨.
Massive thanks to all those that helped.
#WeirdWhales => weirdwhalesnft.com 🐋🚀🌑
Sell-Out / Gas War
11.5 hours from the first mint to a sell-out gas war.
For most of the day, there was a few mints here and there. As usual, at night, I decided to go sleep. What I didn't realise was that the USA were just starting to wake up. The thread broke through and the crowd showed up: 35 mints, 63, then 135 in a single 5-minute window.
At peak, 241 transactions tried to land in one 5-minute window - but only 88 cleared. The rest reverted in a gas war that ended the sale.
The Storm
Once the collection sold out, rumours started circulating as to whether a 12-year-old had actually written the contract, generated the art, and shipped the mint site. Despite my GitHub being public for years and my YouTube channel teaching others code dating back to when I was 10, the suspicion continued and morphed into something stranger - some were wondering if I'd hijacked the identity of the “real” Benyamin Ahmed and was fronting work that wasn't mine.
To answer it, I filmed a Q&A directly addressing every question being thrown around and uploaded it to YouTube. I then went on my first-ever Twitter Space - joint with @BoringBananasCo - so people could hear me talk in real time.
My confirmation was well received and the collection continued to soar.
