A 14-year-old artist from the United States made more than $1 million within 10 hours on an NFT.
The collection, including 8,000 NFT pictures of beluga whales, was sold out in about 10 hours. The total profit amounted to more than $1 million.
The creator of the Belugies collection is Abigail, a young artist from the United States. The 14-year-old girl is fond of drawing. She was introduced to NFTs by her elder brother Adam, a professional trader, who suggested creating a joint project and helped with its implementation.
Abigail first saw a beluga whale at the local oceanarium, and this experience inspired the young artist to create the first NFT. Abigail also drew 167 different accessories. Most of the visual elements were produced on the iPhone 8.
A third-party programmer was brought in to generate the final images and prepared a special script. All the pictures were divided into 3 layers – the whale itself, the background and the accessories. Each element was set to a different level of rarity. The illustrations were generated automatically, each having a unique set of elements. A total of 7980 unique pictures were created this way. Another 20 beluga whales have become “legendary”, i.e. their decorations are not found in the rest of the Belugies.
Arweave, a decentralized storage network, was used to place the illustrations. Using the Candy Machine tool, metadata was bound to the images and a link was established with the NFT. The tokens themselves were issued on the Solana blockchain and placed on the Alpha Art marketplace. The asking price was 0,8 SOL (~$160 at the start of trading).
All the tokens were sold out within 10 hours, and the income exceeded $1 million. Furthermore, 20% of the earned funds were donated for charity:
- $100,000 to the Sunshine Kids Foundation, which helps children with cancer;
- $100,000 to the Beluga Whale Alliance and Ocean Defenders Alliance, non-profit organizations that help beluga whales and clean up the oceans.
The project continues its work, with a website and plans for further development. The website states that a “family contract” is working on the project. In addition, a raffle of 100 booked NFTs from the collection, a community meeting, and an illustrated book about the characters in the collection are announced.
