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SINGAPORE (The Straits Times / ANN): The mysterious Singaporean investor who spent a record $ 69 million worth of cryptocurrency on a digital collage has revealed his identity.
Metakovan, the main financier of the crypto fund Metapurse, caused a stir in the art world when he purchased the landmark work at a Christie’s auction on March 11.
On Thursday (March 18), after days of intense media coverage and speculation about his real identity, he announced himself as Vignesh Sundaresan, an “entrepreneur, coder, and angel investor” in blockchain technologies.
He and his collaborator Anand Venkateswaran, who goes by the name Twobadour, revealed their names in an article on Metapurse’s Substack account.
The duo said they are immigrants from Tamil Nadu, India.
“The goal 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 on the rise.”
The pair run Metapurse, which claims to be the world’s largest non-fungible token fund (NFT).
The record-breaking artwork, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, is a virtual mosaic by digital artist Beeple, also known as Mike Winkelmann.
The image file is linked to an NFT, a non-duplicable proprietary digital certificate for digital assets, which is authenticated using blockchain technology.
Beeple’s work, which attracted the highest sum anyone has ever paid for a digital artwork, is also second only to David Hockney and Jeff Koons for the auction record of any living artist.
Metakovan paid for the job using Ether, the world’s second-largest digital currency. Christie’s auction house had previously said that the work was sold to a Singapore buyer under the name Metakovan (Tamil for “king of the meta”), but did not reveal his legal name.
According to Sundaresan’s LinkedIn profile, he is also the CEO of Portkey Technologies, a Singapore-based IT consulting company.
In the article, Metakovan and Twobadour wrote about their travels as crypto investors and discussed their vision for a Metaverse, a shared space built on virtual reality, virtual currency, and NFT.
His first experiment in this space was called “project B.20”.
At an auction last December on the Nifty Gateway online marketplace, they bought 20 single-issue pieces of Beeple’s work for $ 2.2 million.
“We then buy top-notch real estate in virtual worlds, hire virtual architects to build huge monuments to these iconic pieces, and infuse these constructions with an original soundscape,” they wrote, referring to computer-simulated representations of the world that people can explore and explore. interact with others through avatars.
They then pooled these NFTs together, which were then fractionated and sold as “B20 tokens” to allow for shared ownership.
Metakovan said in an interview on the Clubhouse social audio app last week that the package’s market capitalization had risen to $ 200 million.
In their article, they added that they are also launching a Metapurse scholarship, which starts with a purse of $ 500,000.
“In this first edition, we offer $ 100,000 to five storytellers (writers, producers, content creators) distributed in 12 monthly stipends.”
Applicants, they added, must have a portfolio and have personally created at least one NFT.
They should also not be “anti-currencies”, that is, people who do not have cryptocurrencies in their investment portfolio and who believe that cryptocurrencies will fail. – The Straits Times / Asia News Network
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