Why Teenager Attracting toward NFT

Teens Cash In on the NFT Art Boom
Forget mowing lawns and bagging groceries. Some Gen Z kids are finding other ways to make money this summer.Last fall, Randi Hipper decided to, as she put it recently, “go in-depth with the crypto space.” After hearing about NFTs on Twitter and other social media platforms, Ms. Hipper, then a 17-year-old senior at Xaverian High School in Brooklyn, began releasing her own digital artworks — cartoonish and self-referential pieces showing her cruising in a car with a Bitcoin license plate or riding the Coney Island Wonder Wheel.

Ms. Hipper comes up with the concepts and collaborates with digital artists, including a teenage boy in India who goes by Ajay Toons, offering the works for sale through the NFT marketplace Atomic Hub. An NFT, or a nonfungible token, is a digital file created using blockchain computer code. It is bought using cryptocurrency such as Ether or Wax, and exists as a unique file unable to be duplicated, often just to be admired digitally.

“Right now, I’m trying to do one drop a week,” said Ms. Hipper, who now goes by Miss Teen Crypto and has since turned 18. “I try not to overload my feed, my collectors.”

The 40-year-old digital artist known as Beeple may have grabbed headlines last spring when one of his works sold at Christie’s for $69 million, but NFT markets like Atomic Hub, Nefty Blocks and OpenSea are filled with creators barely old enough to drive. They promote their work not through blue-chip galleries or auction houses but on social media.
“In the NFT world, anyone can post online, market themselves on Twitter and build a following from a young age,” said Griffin Cock Foster, who is 26 and lives in New York City. He and his twin brother, Duncan, founded the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway.

Duncan said, “The comparison I like to make is it’s similar to the way TikTok is causing people to be discovered at a really young age.”

In June, Nifty Gateway did a drop called Nifty Next Generation. It featured the work of jstngraphics, a 17-year-old from Washington State, and Solace, an 18-year-old from Soledad, Calif. Both teenagers have been making NFT art for less than a year, and first drew attention by selling through the online auction site SuperRare. The works of both artists, which ranged in price from about $1,000 to $7,250, sold out.

“I was tossing out random stuff to see what was going on,” said Justin Bodnar (jstngraphics), who makes surreal landscapes and what he described as “Tron-style” art. “Then I got onto SuperRare and things started blowing up.”

Solace, whose real name is Carlos Gomez, began making NFTs on a borrowed iPad because he didn’t own a home computer. “I saw how digital art was being put out there. It was being seen by people and valued,” he said. “I come from poverty my whole life. NFTs changed my life forever.”

Solace and jstngraphics seem like oldsters compared to Benyamin Ahmed, a 12-year-old boy from suburban London, who released an NFT collection last month. The project, “Weird Whales,” featured 3,350 pixelated whales, each with distinct traits, some rarer and thus perceived to be more valuable. The collection, sold out and earned Mr. Ahmed tens of thousands in crypto.

“I got interested in the NFT space because originally I thought it was cool as an online flex,” he told the website Decrypt.

Such improbable success stories have inspired enterprising young people to join the NFT boom. For some, it’s a fun after-school hobby. For others, it’s a perceived gateway to a career as a full-time artist or crypto entrepreneur.

Magnus Aske was a 19-year-old sophomore at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., when he got sick with Covid-19 last March, around the time of the Beeple sale. He spent his 10 days in quarantine learning everything he could about NFTs, and came up with a project involving the antiquities collection of a foreign country (his classmate had connections within the government).

“For me, it’s not even about the money. It’s working with a team, seeing something through from ideation to creation and seeing a sale,” said Mr. Aske, who is now 20 and studying finance and entrepreneurship.

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