The mysterious billionaire from South India who bought the most costly digital painting and what made him do so?

Billionaire yet doesn’t own a house, Billionaire yet doesn’t own a car .

Strange right, but what if I say there is someone who is a billionaire yet doesn’t have a luxurious life. He is a software engineer from South India and one of the first few people to make a huge profit out off Bitcoins, in which he had initially just invested $5000, but is now a Bitcoin Billionaire. He is Vignesh Sundaresan (also known as MetaKovan). 

MetaKovan came to the limelight for making the most expensive NFT (non-fungible token) purchase or most expensive digital purchase for a digital painting worth $69 million from artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple. And why did he do so?

To have a better understanding let’s look back at the early life of Mr. Sundaresan a.k.a MetaKovan.

MetaKovan was born in Tamil Nadu, south India. Like most of the Indians, MetaKovan did not grow up with money. He stated “At night, I used to borrow my friend’s laptop, when they were just going to sleep, and then I used to use my pen-drive and learn how to code.” He further stated that he learned to code and build simple websites, and for most of his life, he could not even afford a laptop. ‘Quite fascinating right. Well there’s more.’

MetaKovan also stated that the first website he created was a freelancing website where anyone can hire to do a designated job for just $10. But was a complete failure and he had to shut it down. Like this he created 54 websites where most of them failed except 3 websites.

Led by all sorts of misery and failures MetaKovan was quite desperate to do something, this was when he came up with idea of block chain crypto currency bitcoin. He said, “It was a global idea, and it had people who were passionate about it from all over the world. That really made me feel that this is going to be really big.”, he also added, “Anything that’s new, is initially rejected. They laugh at first, in the same way, Bitcoin was laughed at. But, that’s when I know that something might work. So when people laugh at something, immediately my brain goes, ‘Maybe we should try it!’.”

And with all the pennies he saved over the year, he invested all in building bitcoin companies. He stated “So, I invested all my time on Bitcoin, and trying to build something on top of it, and thereby learning more about it.”

Further speaking about his current lifestyle he stated that he owns a house neither a car nor not a stock. He owns nothing in the real world, but owns a lot in the virtual world, because he believes everything is virtual, and also has faith that Digital World is the new future.

So, now the question, why did MetaKovan buy a $69million painting?

Well when asked what was going through his mind when he decided to buy a $69million NFT, he simply replied that nothing really was on his mind. “At the auction, there was nothing on my mind. Actually, the funny part is, a lot of people thought that I was nervous and stuff, I was not. I knew this was happening and I had to do it. So I did it.” He also said, “We are planning to build the monument in the Metaverse, which is a virtual space. We are going to build a huge monument, and we are going to put this art there, so that people can enjoy the $440 million pixel art in it’s true form, because it’s a digital native picture.”

He bought the million dollar piece of crypto painting not as an investment or so, but was a complete act of support. He stated that he wanted to support creators, artists, singers, musicians; people from all around the world from any race, gender and colour.

Lastly he said, “People around the world have prejudices, and that gets me really angry, because, you have to look at what people do, and not how people look like or where they are from and make your conclusions.”, he also added, “Time and again, whenever I’ve been rejected or something, from an investor or someone, they’d always tell me I don’t have pedigree. And I hate that because, you never gave me a chance, and if you look at what I do, maybe you’ll reconsider your decision, and I think it’s the same for everyone in this world.

The goal is to decentralise. It is not about money, but it’s about decentralisation.”