An Indian-born blockchain entrepreneur and angel investor have revealed himself as the mystery buyer who paid a record $69.3 million ( ₹504 crores) for a digital artwork last week, describing his purchase as a shot fired for racial equality.
Programmer Vignesh Sundaresan, who is based in Singapore, said in a blog post on Thursday that he had purchased the most expensive digital artwork ever sold to “show Indians and people of color that they too could be patrons” of the arts.
Around 22 million viewers tuned in to Christies.com on March 11 for the final moments of a bidding process that saw Sundaresan — under the pseudonym Metakovan — win the rights to digital artist Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”.
Who is Vignesh Sundaresan?
As a Y-Combinator alumnus (2014 Summer), Vignesh co-founded BitAcces and in six months, he set up 100 Bitcoin ATMs in 18 countries. He founded and conducted a successful token sale for the Lendroid Foundation, a credit engine that powers financial services on the blockchain. He also founded Portkey Technologies Pte Ltd, a software technology provider. Among the first to recognise, he funded some truly unique projects in crypto, including Ethereum, Polkadot, Dfinity, Omisego, and Decentraland.
Having dabbled in stocks and conventional financial instruments as a teenager, Vignesh fell in love with the uncensorable, open world of blockchain in 2013 as a student of Carleton University, Canada. He founded my first crypto startup Coins-e in 2013 and sold it to Casa Crypto in May 2014. In 2014, he built a prototype for Canada’s first BTM (Bitcoin Teller Machine) and set it up first in Ottawa, Canada. This grew into BitAccess, a Y-Combinator-funded enterprise. The Lendroid Foundation represents a long-time dream to enable credit as it should be – global and unopinionated. Portkey Technologies is meant to provide a range of software services across conventional and decentralised systems.
What are Non – Fungible Tokens(NFT)?
NFT are relatively new types of digital assets that are designed to represent ownership of something that is unique and scarce, whether that be tokenized physical assets, rare digital resources, shares, or practically anything else.
Because NFT is unique, no two are alike, and hence NFT cannot be replaced with another identical token—this is a property known as non-fungibility, and it is enforced by smart contracts that prevent duplication, while publicly visible blockchains allow for provable scarcity.
