Roseburg 12-year-old Makes Over $8,000 From Digital Art Collection

Early Sunday morning, Abraham Finlay sat back and watched as his digital art collection called “Bitcoin Birds” sold out to people all over the world in less than an hour. The collection was made up of 400 hand-drawn pixel art birds, and each sold for approximately $26.60. At the end of the day, Abraham took home $8,272.60 Abraham has always had a passion for wildlife and photography. Lately, he has been learning about NFTs and blockchain technology. So, he decided to combine his passions and produce a digital collection of 400 unique pixel art birds. But these aren’t ordinary birds, these birds live on a blockchain as NFTs or Non Fungible Tokens. A blockchain is public ledger, or history of transactions. You can think of NFTs as a kind of digital trading card(ie: baseball card) that lives on a blockchain. So how did people buy these birds? Each person paid roughly $26 for a random bird NFT to be sent to their digital wallet. Certain birds are rarer than others which are defined by a system of different attributes. For example, a few lucky people “minted” a rainbow bird which is one of the more rare birds in the collection. One of the reasons NFT’s have become so popular is that it’s very easy to buy and sell them in marketplaces to collectors all over the world. For example, those lucky enough to snag one of Abraham’s Bitcoin Birds yesterday could list them on the StacksArt marketplace (https://www.stacksart.com/collections/bitcoin-birds/market) and resell them. The demand for the birds is so high that the least expensive bird is currently up for sale for $236 as of this writing. Several have sold already today for around $350 and one sold for $588. NFT’s are a very interesting use case for blockchains and the crypto space. They represent a new way for individuals and creators to be supported by people all over the world with aligned incentives. The individual/artist receives financial support, and supporters receive an NFT that serves as proof of support that gets recorded on these permanent blockchains. The NFT’s also often goes up in value, so the system has a way of rewarding early supporters. Besides the initial compensation for a collection, many blockchains have built-in royalty’s for artists on any subsequent resale of the NFT’s. Abraham is now collecting 5% from each resale, netting him over $109 in the first half of the day since people started reselling them. Check out the Bitcoin Birds collection here: https://www.stacksart.com/collections/bitcoin-birds/market