THE $92 MILLION MAN
Vignesh Sundaresan, better known as Metakovan, talks art, memes, revolution and that world-beating NFT.
Vignesh Sundaresan, better known as Metakovan, talks art, memes, revolution and that world-beating NFT.
“There is so much money being printed right now. Everything is getting inflated, and it’s not like governments can take back the money they’ve put out. If anything, fiat currency is the bubble and crypto is the pin.” It’s a bold statement – and one only a handful of people are qualified to make. Enter Vignesh Sundaresan, better known as Metakovan – the nom de guerre under which he made history by paying US$69 million (S$92 million) for the Ethereumbased, non-fungible token (NFT) of a digital artwork, ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ by American artist Beeple.
It’s the third-highest amount ever paid to a living artist – and a not-insignificant sum that has further raised the recent frenzy around cryptocurrency-based assets. After all, it’s easy to be seduced by the growth of blockchain-based assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, both of which have grown by several orders of magnitude over the past decade. Whether it’s a bubble or not, cryptocurrencies have minted more millionaires than any other piece of technology in history.
“The dotcom boom created a few thousand rich people, but crypto has created hundreds of thousands. There are 2,600 billionaires in the world right now. If or when Bitcoin hits $1 million, the number of billionaires will almost double – there’ll be a massive wealth redistribution and it will be a different world for sure,” says 32-year-old Vignesh.
Having built his wealth in an astonishingly short period, and from virtually nothing, he is also part of this statistic. “The year 2013 was a very different time for me. When I first got into cryptocurrency, I wasn’t even familiar with the concept. I just knew that it was a new trend I wanted to get into. It wasn’t until almost a year later that I started to realise its potential. It was programmable money that was decentralised, and it felt like it could be a global currency,” shares Vignesh.
“I took the small amount of money I earned from offering escrow services to people and rolled it into other investments, including putting some of the Bitcoins I gained into Ethereum, which then blew up.”
However, unlike the vision that countless self-styled cryptocurrency gurus plying get-rich-quick schemes through YouTube advertisements are selling, Vignesh believes in a universe far beyond mere monetary gain, which blockchain technology can build.
“It’s freedom, it’s the future,” he shares, drawing the example of how blockchains do not just power cryptocurrencies, but also smart contracts and financial logistics. One of the applications he’s currently excited about is decentralised finance (DeFi), a model that bypasses traditional financial institutions such as banks or exchanges to enable everything from peer-to-peer lending or even asset speculation.
ASSET CLASS
Speaking to Vignesh reveals him to be part blockchain prophet and part futurist, and on his way to becoming a hugely influential figure in the art world. While he seemingly emerged out of nowhere into mainstream attention, Metakovan – the pseudonym used by Vignesh in the
blockchain community – was already wellknown in crypto circles for the $110,000 purchase of a virtual car on the NFTbacked racing simulator F1 Delta Time.
‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ is also not the first Beeple he has bought. He paid $2.2 million for a collection of 20 oneof-one artworks he then bundled with three commissioned VR museums as a NFT before releasing them publicly as tokens called B20 at $0.36 each. At the time of writing, a B20 is worth $5.28.
All this is backed by Vignesh’s belief that a NFT “captures the aura of the moment” each time a piece of the asset is bought. Unlike in a traditional art purchase, where records exist only between the involved parties, the existence of NFTs on the blockchain means the purchase record is not just timestamped, but also distributed and immutable – creating a powerful snapshot of the zeitgeist surrounding what is, to all intents and purposes, an immaterial piece of media.
“It’s like the Mona Lisa. People talk about it all the time, but it’s not like you can touch the actual painting. We don’t touch art anymore. The Mona Lisa is interesting because the physical piece represents the story. In pretty much the same way, his NFT captures all of this. I’m a story fanatic. The money I paid was not just for the art, it also has all of this story that we’re sitting here and talking about now,” says Vignesh.
“With the US$69 million purchase, we broke the Internet and art history. I don’t think this will be repeated for some time. Even if it is bubble-like, as some people say, it becomes part of the story – and I get to be a part of that.”
THE MEME ECONOMY
If Vignesh’s landmark purchase was a story, then one of the main co-authors would be Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann. Before putting his work on NFT-listing platforms, the most Winklemann had ever sold were prints of his work for small amounts despite having a considerable following on social media.
Much of this following is thanks to Wimkelmann’s oeuvre of bizarre, often unsafe for work digital drawings and short animations that satirise Internet memes and popular culture – like a naked (and very well-endowed) Joe Biden dancing in the Oval Office.
Like every other person that has found fame and fortune through Internet virality, Winkelmann’s work is part of a strange new world – one where jokes get turned into valuable assets, like with Rare Pepe NFTs. And even one where multi-billiondollar hedge funds are beaten out by retail traders more concerned with making injokes than actual investing – like with the GameStop saga.
“Cultural context is very important. Some of the traditional people don’t see these as art, but I’ve been telling people that Beeple is the artist of our generation because fame in traditional media is so fleeting these days that the only way to become relevant is to become a meme. We’re making the meme economy real,” says Vignesh.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
This economy is also part of what drives the Metaverse, a term coined in 1992 by science fiction author Neal Stephenson to describe a digital space similar to factual, virtual worlds like Second Life. It has since evolved beyond Stephenson’s original definition and, as Vignesh explains, has come to define any currently unconnected virtual space where social interaction can take place, and where an economy exists. Art, like the NFT pieces bought by Vignesh, can be displayed in virtual galleries where people can view them together in the same instance.
It’s in the Metaverse that Vignesh also foresees creators like artists, musicians and writers breaking free from the current limitations of the Internet by heading into a decentralised Wild West-type space.
“The Internet is currently a very hostile place. The data is concentrated in a few areas, creating a Big Brother atmosphere. When was the last time you visited an artist’s website directly? We don’t window-shop the Internet anymore; it’s all aggregated and algorithmically pushed by a few major companies and platforms – and all of it is driven by how they can profit.
“The Metaverse attracts a diverse range of people, all with different ideologies, and it’s a beautiful place with an economy shared by its inhabitants. It’s almost like going back to a time before the Internet. Where you could make friends based on shared interests in real-time.”
Like Vignesh’s choice to use the Metakovan pseudonym, the Metaverse represents a chance for people to reinvent themselves – and not just for an online persona, but one with actual social and economic consequences as well.
“In the gaming world, everyone uses a pseudonym. It’s weird to be called Vignesh in the gaming world. You always want something a little edgier, a little more wishful. No one gets a choice to name themselves. I recommend everyone trying a pseudonym. The process of arriving at one makes you question a lot about what you are.”
"There is so much money being printed right now. Everything is getting inflated, and it’s not like governments can take back the money they've put out. If anything, fiat currency is the bubble and crypto is the pin."