NFT hype: 22-year-old computer science student from Indonesia becomes a millionaire selling selfies

The NFT space, though still in its nascent stage, is growing rapidly. Bollywood stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Haasan, Sonu Nigam and Salman Khan are some of the first in their industry to have taken to NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and are backing this digital asset. NFT, in a simple term, is a digital asset that uses blockchain technology to keep track of who owns a digital object. It could be an image, video or in-game item among other options.

This 22-year-old Sultan Gustaf Al Ghozali, an Indonesian college student is all over the internet because of his selfies. He is minting millions of dollars just by selling NFTs. He converted as many as 1,000 of his selfies taken over the course of five years into NFTs and sold them on the OpenSea marketplace.

This computer science student took expressionless selfies in sitting or standing both, in front of his computer every day between the ages 18 and 22 and later turned these images into NFTs and put them on sale on OpenSea for sale at $3 (Rs 222 approx).

His NFT collection has touched a total trade volume of ETH 317 or $1,041,325 (Rs 7.73 crore approx), making him a millionaire, according to a report by Lifestyle Asia.

Also Read: NFTs generated over $23 billion in trading volume in 2021 amid craze for digital assets

It is however unbelievable for a 22-year-old boy that people are buying his selfies. He, in fact, took to micro-blogging site Twitter and requested people to not abuse his pictures or else his “parents would be disappointed. In his tweet he wrote, “You can do anything like flippin but please don’t abuse my pictures. Or else, my parents will be very disappointed in me.” Check out the full tweet here.

Media reports also suggest that Indonesian celebrities have also helped in selling his selfies. Some of Ghozali’s selfie NFTs have been even sold for ETH 0.9, nearly $3,000 or say, Rs 2.22 lakh roughly. According to DappRadar data, NFT sales volume surged to $10.7 billion in the third quarter of 2021, seeing a substantial eightfold jump compared to the previous quarter.