Metakovan, mystery buyer of Beeple's $69.3 million NFT art, reveals identity

Mumbai: Metakovan, the rumoured Tamil origin buyer of the landmark NFT art piece by digital artist Beeple, which sold for $69.3 million in a Christie’s auction revealed his identity in a Substack blog post on Thursday and announced a $500,000 fellowship for ‘crypto storytellers' funded by his crypto investment firm, Metapurse.


Vignesh Sundaresan, Singapore-based blockchain entrepreneur, coder and angel investor identified himself as ‘Metakovan’, the buyer behind Beeple’s digital art piece ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ while detailing his journey into the NFT and crypto world. The substack blog is titled 'NFTs: The First 5000 Beeples - How two immigrants from Tamil Nadu bought a piece of digital art for $69M. And what we’re funding next.'


Currently CEO at software technology firm, Portkey Technologies and Founder of Lendroid, a blockchain startup Sundaresan 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.

The blog also detailed the journey of the steward of the investment firm, ‘Twobadour’ or Anand Venkateswaran who is currently head of communications at Lendroid.

Non-fungible tokens or NFTs transform digital artworks into unique verifiable digital assets that are tradable on the blockchain. NFT assets have taken the crypto world by storm with other notable sales including a video clip of LeBron James which sold for over $200,000 and the decade-old "Nyan Cat" GIF which went for $600,000.

In the blog post, Sundaresan also announced the crypto fellowship sponsored by Metapurse, an NFT holding company whose mission is “to democratize access to NFTs”.

“Metapurse is a crypto-exclusive fund that specializes in identifying early-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estate,” the blog noted.

The grant will offer $100,000 to five storytellers - writers, producers, content makers, spread across 12 monthly stipends.

“Metapurse captures the zeitgeist of the NFT renaissance,” the blog said adding that Metapurse was the “largest NFT fund in the world” representing Metakovan’s (Sundaresan’s) collection of NFTs, and his investments in key projects in the space.

The investments detailed included art platforms Async.Art and Superrare, blockchains like Flow which hosts NBA Top Shots (an online marketplace for officially licensed digital collectibles from the NBA), lifestyle NFT platforms like Grow Your Base among others.

Sundaresan added that Metapurse also flagged off a high profile open auction of NFTs where 20 single edition art pieces by Beeple were purchased for $2.2M. The NFT pieces were then bundled and tokenized into B20 tokens. Beeple was also given 2% of these tokens.