A Digital Art was recently auctioned by auction house Christie’s at $69 Million making it the most expensive digital art ever. While it was a landmark achievement for NFTs, many were wondering about the pseudonym MetaKovan who made the following bid.
Well, MetaKovan is an Indian entrepreneur from Indian state Tamil Nadu, currently settled in Singapore known as Vignesh Sundaresan. He along with Anand Venkateswaran, known as Twobadour were the bidders for the digital art created by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann).
In a blog post published on March 18, they revealed their identity with the following statement:
“The point was to show Indians and people of colour 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.”
Sundaresan is an alumni of the US-based startup accelrator Y-combinator, had a look at crypto in 2013. At the time, he was short of money and to combat this, he started offering escrow services and with time, set up a exchange in Canada known as Coin-e.
After a while, after investing at the ICO of Ethereum (World’s first Initial coin offering), he was able to arrange money to fund multiple projects like Polkadot, Tezo, Dfinity and Decentraland.
All this in turn led to the creation of Metapurse, which is a crypto-exclusive fund specializing in identifying inital-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, virtual estate, etcetera.
But as of now, the entrepreneur-duo has to deal with the controversy.
What is the controversy?
B20 Project, Metapurse’s first task was a purchase of 20 single edition art pieces by Beeple for $2.2 million subsequently setting up a collection. Their plan was to sought out prime real estate in the virtual world by signing architects to create monuments and infusing these structures with an original soundscape.
But there’s a problem: When MetaKovan created the B20 project, he allocated 59% tokens for himself and 2% went to Beeple.
Ami Castor, an independent blogger claims this to be a conflict of interest. Also, the prices of B20 tokens shot up from $0.36 to $23 per piece after the auction, at a rate of over 6000%.
Although the prices have settled down to $10.91 as per Coinmarketcap, Beeple’s share is still worth above $3 million given he sells those coins quickly and factoring liquidity.
The boys had taken note of the blog post and had written to her to take it down. In reply, she said:
“Since I published this article, Sundaresan has written to me and asked me to take it down. I refused, but agreed to make edits if he could point to anything specific that was wrong — so far, he hasn’t.”