Indian-origin Programmer Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran who is based in Singapore, both buyers of a digital artwork stored in a JPEG file sold for $69.3 million (around ₹504 crore), said they had humble upbringings.
Venkateswaran revealed that Sundaresan couldn't afford a laptop when he was learning to code. Sundaresan would walk around with a flash drive and borrow his friends' laptop, Venkateswaran said, by describing his purchase as a shot fired for racial equality.
He further said, in a blog post 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”.
Bidding for the virtual collage of 5,000 images -- the first purely digital NFT-based artwork ever sold by a major auction house -- had started at $100 before the price skyrocketed. An NFT, or a non-fungible token, uses the same blockchain technology behind cryptocurrencies to turn anything from art to sports trading cards into virtual collector's items that cannot be duplicated.
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.
