Lapatilla
Sultan Gustaf Al Ghozali sits in front of his computer and takes a photo of himself. His plan is to repeat that routine every day, during the five years that his computer science degree lasts, and thus, when the day of his graduation arrives, put together a short video compiling all the images to see their evolution over time. Those selfies are now some kind of art collection worth $1 million.
For: Clarion
The explanation for this unexpected viral and millionaire phenomenon is the new technologies, specifically those called NFT. The acronym in English refers to the term Non-Fungible Tokens, something like a digital file that keeps a piece inside, making it unique and unrepeatable. For example, a file that contains an original text, an audio or, in this case, images.
Who acquires these pieces is their absolute owner, which makes digital elements such as a tweet, or the video of a sports play become collectibles with an owner who paid for them. The young Indonesian simply sought to investigate the operation of this particular technology and to do so he used the photos he had taken between the ages of 18 and 22, without imagining what was regarding to happen.
“I thought it would be funny if one of the collectors collected my face,” said the young man, who uploaded the photos to the NFT trading platform “OpenSea” with the caption “Ghozali Everyday”. In total there are regarding 1000 images to which he gave a value of 3 dollars, knowing that nobody would be interested in something so insignificant. But…
The chef who made the young student rich
Chef Arnold Poernomo, well known in Asia, was the one who changed everything. He bought some of the student’s images and promoted the young man who sells his selfies on his social networks. Thus, sales began to grow without restraint.
Al Ghozali had begun posting the images on the platform in December, without repercussion until the intervention of the chef who has 1.7 million followers on his Instagram account. The value of the photos began to rise, quickly more than 400 people bought the property of these completely expressionless photos.
Until this Friday followingnoon, Ghozali’s collection had accumulated a total commercial volume of 317 ether, the cryptocurrency with which these operations are carried out, equivalent to more than one million dollars.
The 22-year-old got rich in the most unexpected and incomprehensible way possible, and even he still doesn’t fully understand what’s going on. “To be honest, I still don’t have the courage to tell my parents, they would be wondering where I got the money,” he confessed Thursday at a press conference he gave on the campus of the university where he studies in Semarang.
On his Twitter, where he has more than 16,000 followers, the student often provides updates on the sale of his selfies on the OpenSea platform.
“Today sold more than 230+ and until now I don’t understand why you want to buy #NFT photos of me. But i thank you guys for 5 years of effort paid off” (“Today I sold more than 230 and I still can’t understand why they want to buy NFT photos of me. But thanks, friends, for these 5 years of effort they paid off”), he wrote on his Twitter account the young man.
Now Ghozali is trying to plan his new life, which changed radically from one day to the next. He dreams of opening his own animation studio one day, said he plans to invest the money, and of course will continue to take daily selfies until he finally finishes college.
