On March 11, Beeple's NFT named ‘Everydays - The First 5000 Days' being bought for a whopping $69.3 million took the world by storm. It marked a slew of records—it was the first purely digital NFT-based artwork ever offered by a major auction house. It was the most expensive ever sold and positioned Beeple, aka Mike Winkelmann, among the top three most valuable living artists.
However, all the while, the buyers of the landmark NFT art piece remained anonymous behind the pseudonym Metakovan. All we knew was that Metakovan was the pseudonymous founder of ‘crypto-exclusive fund’ Metapurse, the buyer of Beeple’s $69.3m NFT.
That's not the case anymore.
Metapurse was created by Metakovan and his partner Twobadour—also a pseudonym. In a blogpost, the two Tamil Nadu immigrants to Singapore revealed their names—Vignesh Sundaresan(Metakovan) and Anand Venkateswaran (Twobadour).
Sundaresan is a Singapore-based blockchain entrepreneur, coder and angel investor, and is currently the CEO at software technology firm, Portkey Technologies and Founder of Lendroid, a blockchain startup, The Economic Times reported. He is a Y-Combinator alum. He has also co-founded a crypto startup called BitAcces, which set up 100 Bitcoin ATMs in 18 countries between 2013-2015.
Venkateswaran is currently head of communications at Lendroid.
"The point was to show Indians and people of color that they too could be patrons, that crypto was an equalizing power between the West and the Rest, and that the global south was rising," the two stated in the blogpost.
Their purchase became the third costliest artwork in the world ever and was purchased pseudonymously by the investors, who then revealed themselves on Clubhouse, before writing a detailed Substack post about it as well.
The duo also announced a $500,000 fellowship for ‘crypto storytellers' funded by his crypto investment firm, Metapurse.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique files that live on a blockchain and are able to verify ownership of a work of digital art. Buyers typically get limited rights to display the digital artwork they represent, but in many ways, they’re just buying bragging rights and an asset they may be able to resell later.
However, what differentiates it is the fact that the creator gets a royalty every single time the piece of work is resold.