On Friday, Stefania Palma broke virtual bread with crypto-mogul Vignesh Sundaresan (AKA Metakovan) for the
Financial Times’s “Lunch with the FT” series. The conversation surfaced noteworthy parallels between venture investing and the art market, including a new explanation for Sundaresan’s willingness to pay $69.3 million for Beeple’s
Everydays: The First 5,000 Days. It now sounds like his big bid was partly just a means to a greater socioeconomic end—another indicator that the penthouse level of the crypto-art trade is mostly mirroring that of the traditional art trade.
To refresh everyone’s memory in this madcap year, Christie’s originally identified the winning bidder for Beeple’s magnum opus (which was marketed as the first “purely digital work with a unique NFT” ever sold by a major auction house) only as Metakovan, a pseudonymous Singapore-based blockchain entrepreneur behind the combination crypto-investment fund and NFT collection Metapurse. Through his equally mystery-shrouded associate Twobadour, Metakovan communicated to my colleague Eileen Kinsella that he had acquired