Singapore-based buyer unmasked in claim to US$69m NFT

A SINGAPORE-BASED "entrepreneur, coder and angel investor" in blockchain technologies named Vignesh Sundaresan is likely Metakovan, a mysterious buyer that spent US$69 million worth of cryptocurrencies on a piece of digital art.

On Friday, Mr Vignesh told The Business Times that he plans to create a "decentralised cultural movement".

He was first identified in an article published Thursday via his non-fungible token (NFT) investment fund Metapurse's Substack account. Metakovan and Twobadour, who co-runs Metapurse, identified themselves as Mr Vignesh and Mr Anand Venkateswaran respectively. (see amendment note)

Both men said they are from Tamil Nadu. Mr Vignesh is currently based in Singapore, as he had let on in various recent interviews given pseudonymously, while Mr Anand is based in Chennai, according to his Twitter profile. In the Tamil language, Metakovan appears to stand for "King of Meta".

Prior to this announcement, the duo have been fiercely protective of their identities, appearing in interviews only in their avatars. But they had "decided to drop a few hints" in a press release last week, after winning Christie's auction for Beeple's Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, as well as in an earlier Clubhouse interview.

"The point was to show Indians and people of colour that they too could be patrons, that crypto was an equalising power between the West and the Rest, and that the global south was rising," they wrote.

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On Thursday, Mr Vignesh and Mr Anand also announced the Metapurse Fellowship, a grant kicking off with a US$500,000 purse for "crypto storytellers". In its first edition, five writers, producers and content makers will each be offered US$100,000 spread across 12 monthly stipends.

Applicants must have a portfolio of work and personally created at least one NFT.

And the third condition? "No anti-coiners allowed :)"

It is referring here to individuals who do not have cryptocurrencies in their portfolio and who believe that cryptocurrency, in general, will fail.

Metapurse dubs itself as a crypto-exclusive fund started by Mr Vignesh and Mr Anand last year. It supposedly curates early-stage NFT projects across blockchain infrastructure, such as digital art, collectibles, and virtual estate.

NFTs are non-duplicable digital certificates of ownership for digital assets, which are authenticated or "minted" using blockchain technology. Some popular forms of NFTs include digital art, tweets and videos. The vast majority of NFTs are built on the Ethereum blockchain.

A publicly accessible digital ledger tracks who owns a given NFT and ensures that it cannot be duplicated or tampered with.

The owner of an NFT has the rights to resell, distribute or license the digital asset as they please.

Metapurse's first project, dubbed B.20, involves 20 of Beeple's single-edition art pieces and virtual real estate, transformed into virtual monuments housed in a virtual museum, then infused with an original soundscape.

All these NFTs were then bundled up, fractionalised and sold as B.20 tokens. The duo announced their US$2.2 million purchase of Beeple's collection in January.

In a Clubhouse interview last week, Mr Vignesh, taking on his Metakovan pseudonym, said the fund's market capitalisation has ratcheted up to US$200 million.

Metakovan, who has repeatedly referred to himself as a "crypto native" and claimed he had lived solely off crypto for several years, shared in the latest Substack article that he discovered crypto in 2013 and first started offering escrow services for crypto users.

"Unlike the startup world where the capital raise process is opaque and confined to a rarified group, new ideas in crypto are funded by people like you and I. The Ethereum ICO (initial coin offering) allowed me, an unknown, to invest in it. This investment would turn out to become a large sum of money in due course," he claimed.

On Metapurse's vision, Mr Vignesh and Mr Anand noted that digital decentralisation allows the sharing of different cultures. "Dominant cultures have a tendency to imperialise, to centralise. We see the global Metaverse as an antidote to this tendency. There is space for many cultures, lifestyles, and ideologies. An opportunity to find your 'tribe', no matter where you're from," they claimed.

READ MORE:

• NFT: the crypto craze over memes, tweets and pixel art
• The intrigue - and costs - of the rise of non-fungible tokens or NFTs

The article has been amended to correct the spelling of Anand Venkateswaran. An earlier version spelt his name as Anand Vankateswaran.