ZACHARY, La. — ZACHARY, La. (AP) — After she tore her ACL in September, Mya Parker was looking for things to do to fill in the space that sports played in her life.
So the 15-year-old Zachary High freshman started creating NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as a way of combining her interests in art and investing. So far, she’s made more than $10,000 selling her drawings online.
“I would never had the time to do all this before I got hurt,” said Mya, sitting back in her mother’s real estate office. “It’s allowed me to create a living. Well, not quite a living.”
NFTs are digital objects, such as artwork or video clips, with digital certificates of authenticity attached to them. Because the ownership is attached to the NFT and stored on computers around the world, it is impossible to lose or destroy the object.
Some NFT artworks have sold for millions of dollars. Mya’s drawings are priced as much as $140,000 on the NFT marketplace OpenSea.
Mya has been in the talented art program in the Zachary school system since the third grade. And she’s been interested in investing for several years. Her grandfather took her to buy gold about two or three years ago and bought her stock in different companies as a present for getting good grades.
One of the things that Mya said got her interested in stocks was when she read a book about a girl who had stock in Coca-Cola. She liked the idea of actually being able to own a part of the beverage company.
She was so interested in investing that Candace Temple, Mya’s mother, said she would rush home from school every day to see how her shares did.
“She’s been able to learn about the economy, learn about finance and it’s allowed her to use her gifts,” Temple said.
Getting involved in investing and NFTs has also allowed Mya to take risks at an early age, she said, which is good because people are leery about taking risks as they get older.
Mya has made about 100 NFTs in a variety of different styles. Her mother recently gifted her with an iPad so that’s allowed her to improve her art skills.
“My art comes from two ways. Sometimes I have an experience and I create something from that experience,” she said. “And sometimes, I doodle when I’m bored.”
The key is to do a lot of different things when you are young and see what you are good at doing, Mya said.
“It doesn’t matter what you are as long as your heart is good,” she said. “You’ll find out what you are good at.”
