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CRYPTOWHALE IN SINGAPORE IS BUYER OF $69M BEEPLE NFT
- By The Financial District
- Mar 14, 2021
- 2 min read
A digital asset investor who goes by the handle Metakovan and refuses to give his full name announced that he is the buyer of the record-breaking $69.3 million digital artwork that sold Thursday, James Tarmy reported for Bloomberg News.
Christie’s auction house, which hosted the sale, confirmed his statement, also declining to reveal his legal name. Metakovan is the chief financier behind Metapurse, a crypto-based fund that acquires NFTs and other virtual properties; it claims to be the largest NFT fund in the world.
In January, the company released a statement saying that, excluding works by Beeple, it had acquired a portfolio of $3.2 million worth of NFTs. “I think this is going to be a billion-dollar piece,” Metakovan says in an interview over Google Hangouts. “I don’t know when.”
The work in question is a mosaic of 5,000 artworks made over the last 13 years by Mike Winkelmann, who goes by the artist name Beeple. Included in the mosaic are images of Abraham Lincoln spanking a baby Donald Trump, a giant rabbit eating children on a playground, and a muscled Tom Hanks beating up an anthropomorphic representation of the coronavirus.
The image file is connected to a non-fungible token (NFT), which was “minted” just last month, and serves as its certificate of authenticity recorded via blockchain technology.
The auction for Everydays: the First 5,000 Days opened for bidding on Feb. 25 and shot from $100 to $1 million in minutes.
But it wasn’t until the final 10 minutes of the sale that the bidding action became particularly intense. The number quickly jumped from $14 million to $30 million. With seconds to spare, Metakovan placed the winning bid. This isn’t the first time that Metakovan has bought works by Beeple.
In a December auction of Beeple’s art on the online marketplace Nifty Gateway, Metakovan purchased 20 single-edition images for a combined $2.2 million. He later fractionalized them. Currently, those works have a market cap of $230 million, according to the crypto asset price-tracking site Coinmarketcap.
