During the height of the NFT craze in 2021, I saw a number of people making money from something so ridiculously simple. Especially after a literal 12-year-old made $400 000 from selling a pixelated image of a whale. So following of the footsteps of young Benyamin with his Weird Whales NFT project, I set out to create my own under the name of Seal Token.

So using photoshop and my expansive imagination, I created a pixel art seal - in almost the exact same style as Benyamin's whales. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, right? I created PNG files in photoshop of every little asset that I could tack onto this outline of a seal. I created color schemes and named them with cool, enticing names like earth and fairy and monkey. I created scarcity for some of the color schemes, making them rarer than others to artificially increase the value of them. I created different types of tusks and eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and glasses and necklaces and even a little hat.

Finally, I used node.js to generate almost every possible combination of the colors and eyes and tusks and hats and faces and store all of the metadata about them in a csv file. I then used a python script to read the csv file and automatically mint the NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain using OpenSea - for which, there was no API at the time.

I ended up creating 3441 individual little Seals, and made a grand total of 0.000000 ETH from the project. Some might say that it was worth it because of all I learned about the blockchain and so on and so forth. But I will not be doing it again, and everything I learnt about the blockchain was against my will