While some of us are still trying to figure out exactly what NFTs are, others -- like a 13-year-old girl -- are making millions selling digital art.
Nyla Hayes turned her passion for drawing into a lucrative business, making millions of dollars selling her unique portraits as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, for thousands of dollars a piece.
Non-fungible tokens are non-interchangeable units of data such as photos, videos, audio and artwork, that can be sold and traded, and can only have one official owner at a time.
Hayes' NFT collection combines her love for Brontosaurus dinosaurs and women, featuring portraits of women of all races with elongated necks.
"At first I just wanted to put two things that I love together, and that was a Brontosaurus and women," she told NBC's Today. "I wanted to show how beautiful and strong women were, and I thought of the Brontosaurus as that as well."
Hayes has been drawing for as long as she can remember, but she only got into digital art a few years ago.
"I started drawing at 4. When I was 9, my parents got me a smartphone to make digital art. I made drawings of people with long necks, which I call Long Neckies," she told TIME for Kids.
Things really took off when her uncle told her mom about NFTs.
"We watched YouTube to learn how to create and sell them," she said. "Soon, people were buying NFTs of my Long Neckies. I have made more than 960 ETH." That’s digital currency worth about $3.4 million.
In the past two months alone, Hayes sold one portrait for $6,621 and another for $3,920 on Instagram. Her most expensive NFT sold for $11,737 last August, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Last October, Hayes was named as TIME Magazine's first Artist-in-Residence for its TIMEPieces digital community, tasked with developing an intimate, focused collection of art.
"These Artist-in-Residence collections will continue to allow TIME to bring art on to the blockchain that marries the artist's signature style with a renowned TIME franchise. This extends TIME’s nearly 100-year tradition of highlighting great artists and photographers of a given era while leading the brand into new innovative spaces -- in this case NFT's and Web3," the company said on its website.
Her collection, "Long Neckie Women of the Year" features 1,000 unique pieces based on TIME's Women of the Year franchise.
Related
Related
