A digital artwork, known as a non-fungible token (NFT), was sold for a staggering $69 million last week, marking it as one of the most expensive NFTs ever sold. This sale at Christie’s, a prestigious auction house, ranks as the third-highest price paid for a piece by a living artist. The artwork, titled ‘Everyday: The First 5000 Days,’ captivated many, sparking curiosity about the identity of the bidder who goes by the pseudonym MetaKovan.
It turns out it wasn’t just one man, but two entrepreneurs from Tamil Nadu who are currently living in Singapore—Vignesh Sundaresan, who goes by MetaKovan, and Anand Venkateswaran, also known as Twobadour.
The Story Metakovan
Metakovan is a pseudonymous NFT collector who spent big on NFTs and now he wants to fund crypto artists. He purchased a Beeple artwork for $69 million. The purchase was a part of the NFT fund Metapurse, which is now launching a grant for content creators in the crypto space. He has made history in the crypto space.
Metakovan is an immigrant from Tamil Nadu, India named Vignesh Sundaresan, who bought a piece of digital art for $69M. He discovered crypto in early 2013, he had no money, so he started looking for ways to earn it on the global, open network of Bitcoin. He began by offering escrow services, which then became an exchange called Coins-e. In the 2013 bull run, he experienced exponential growth for the first time as an entrepreneur, clocking 14,000 users in six months. Then he sold Coins-e in May 2014.
With newfound creators in the space, He co-founded BitAccess, a Y-Combinator-backed project (S14), and took over as its CTO to program and install Bitcoin ATMs. Within a year, they installed 100 ATMs in 18 countries. As of today, there are over 1605 Bitcoin ATMs deployed by BitAccess all over the globe. He left BitAccess in late 2016, to follow a trail of serendipity into the Ether.
The first BTM he sold was to Anthony Di Iorio, a co-founder of Ethereum. Anthony asked him for a maximalist version of him to contribute to the crowd sale. So he invested in the world’s first ICO.
The Ethereum ICO allowed him, to invest in it. This investment would turn out to become a large sum of money in due course. The money from that ETH investment rolled into several other new ideas, some of them billion-dollar projects. Also into Metapurse — with significant investments in NFTs — gaming assets, art, and, the iconic Beeple 5000.
This free market allowed him to build wealth and to build on an idea as well. Lendroid is a significant initiative for enabling globally accessible, un-opinionated credit. The Lendroid Foundation, a registered, annually audited CLG in Singapore, concluded a token sale in 2018, not unlike the original Ethereum ICO. Lendroid is actively developing open-source software for crypto.
The Lendroid-powered WhaleStreet today has over $100 million in total value locked (TVL). Before WhaleStreet, Lendroid created an array of experiments in DeFi. They were the first to enable ENS loans, champion decentralized margin trading, create a secondary market for DAI loans with Reloanr, and envision the future of risk through Deleuze. And in the NFT space, they developed Rightshare for NFT leasing that evolved into the concept of Metatokens.
Story Of Twobadour
Twobadour named Anand Venkateswaran was exposed to crypto as early as 2013, through Metakovan. He, however, was convinced it wasn’t for him. After four years, he ventured in by working on Lendroid. The building never stopped, and at the beginning of 2020, they reached a creative peak. In that year, they picked up a trail of NFTs.
They were forced to look inward during the lockdown. He explodes with life when he encounters the fertile artistic playing field of the NFT space. Twobadour’s trajectory is a metaphor for the potential of the crypto Metaverse. According to him, Artists can circumvent some of the crypto learning curves by jumping straight into a virtual domain where they can immediately create value with NFTs.
Metakovan and Twobadour are powerful personas that need not be one person or have just one purpose. As founder and steward of Metapurse, they helped build the metaverse.
The Story of Metapurse
Metapurse is a crypto-exclusive fund that specializes in identifying early-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estate. The thesis of Metapurse is that the art of the Metaverse will be crucial, beautiful, digital, and cryptographical. And it will be stored on-chain.
Metapurse captures the zeitgeist of the NFT renaissance. As the largest NFT fund in the world, it represents Metakovan’s collection of NFTs and his investments in key projects in the space. The first Metapurse experiment in this space was the B.20 project, where they experienced a bundle of high-value NFTs. At an open auction, they bought 20 single edition art pieces of Beeple’s for $2.2M.
They also bought prime real estate in virtual worlds, brought in virtual architects to build huge monuments for these iconic pieces, and infused these builds with an original soundscape. They then bundled all of these NFTs and tokenized the ownership of this entire experience into the B20 tokens. Nearly 30 people worked on this project, all of whom chose to be compensated in B20s. They also paid $69.3M at Christie’s for the other piece.
They said that “Beeple, the muse for this frontier madness, is the artist of our generation. Look at the first (top-left) picture in his Everyday series all the way diagonally to the bottom-right. The story of the 5000 is simple. Start somewhere, be genuine, be consistent, work hard, and you will find success.”
Also Read: MetaKovan Buyer of The $69.3 Million Beeple NFT Reveals True Identity
They announced the Metapurse Fellowship, a grant that kicks off with a $500,000 purse. They offer $100,000 to five storytellers — writers, producers, content makers — spread across 12 monthly stipends.
There are three conditions
- You must have a portfolio of work.
- You must have personally created at least one NFT.
- No anti-coiners allowed.
This grant is open worldwide.
