Buyer of Beeple’s $69M NFT on Christie’s discloses identity

The mysterious buyer of the world’s most expensive non-fungible token “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple, has revealed their identity.

Metapurse, a global NFT fund whose founder successfully bid and acquired the piece in a Christie’s auction for $69.3 million in early March, penned a blog post Thursday, disclosing the real names and stories of key figures behind the project.

According to the announcement, Vignesh Sundaresan is the real name of MetaKovan, the pseudonymous founder of Metapurse and the buyer of the Beeple’s $69 million NFT. Before founding Metapurse, Sundaresan had been actively involved in the crypto industry since 2013, creating crypto exchange Coins-e and co-founding crypto ATM project BitAccess.

Sundaresan is operating the Metapurse fund with Anand Venkateswaran, who is also known by his pseudonym Twobadour. As announced, both Sundaresan and Venkateswaran are immigrants from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

“We could have remained pseudonymous, but we decided to drop a few hints in our joint press release with Christie’s [...] 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,” Sundaresan and Venkateswaran wrote. They also stated that their pseudonyms “were never meant to be masks” but rather “exosuits.”

In conjunction with the identity disclosure, Metapurse has announced the Metapurse Fellowship, a grant including five fellowships to writers about the convergence of NFT tech, art and finance. “In this first edition, we offer $100,000 to five storytellers — writers, producers, content makers — spread across 12 monthly stipends.”