Meet the 12-year-old coder who made £290,000 from selling whale NFTs

• Video report by ITV News Reporter Amani Ibrahimi

A 12-year-old boy has made the equivalent of £290,000 after he created more than 3,000 virtual whale drawings and sold digital tokens of them.

Benyamin Ahmed started coding from the age of five after being taught by his computer programmer dad.

He then taught himself how to pixel this year - a pixel is also known as a picture element and when joined together forms a digital image.

"I made them to auction them off originally, it started as a learning experience, but then went viral on Twitter," Benyamin told ITV News.

The pixellated whales are sold as NFTs (non-fungible token), the artwork acts as a certificate of authenticity, which proves the buyer is the owner of the original artwork. It can then be traded online like a collector's item.

Benyamin said: "I got interested in NFTs early this year, and found pixel art a really easy form of art to learn, so I watched a few tutorials on pixel art, and then used a whale, which is a common meme used in Minecraft, and YouTube and various other platforms."

NFTs have grown in popularity in recent years, the most famous example of one is one of the first viral video on YouTube - the Charlie bit my finger video - which sold as an NFT for more than £500,000.

Benjamin could become youngest person to make a million dollars in cryptocurrency, if he continues to sell his NFTs.