Share this article

Crypto Investor MetaKovan Announced as Buyer of $69.3M Beeple NFT

Christie's has disclosed the buyer of the record-setting NFT sold Thursday.

Updated May 9, 2023, 3:17 a.m. Published Mar 12, 2021, 6:22 p.m.

MetaKovan, the pseudonymous founder of non-fungible token (NFT) fund Metapurse, is the proud owner of the Beeple NFT auctioned by Christie's on Thursday for $69.3 million.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW

Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters

By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy.

“When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat," MetaKovan said in a press release issued by the 255-year-old auction house.

MetaKovan paid for Beeple's "Everydays" in ether, Christie's confirmed, beating out Tron founder Justin Sun in a last-minute bid. The final sale price was 42,329.453 ETH. Appearing on CoinDesk TV earlier Friday, Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann) said, “I probably will keep a percentage of [my earnings] in ether.”

The auction house said its website hosted around 22 million visitors for the final moments of bidding on the most expensive NFT ever sold.

Not much is known about the pseudonymous MetaKovan other than the association with the Metapurse NFT fund, the largest such fund in the world. Metapurse already owns a smattering of Beeple pieces that it has offered to the public in fractionalized form through B20 token sales.

The B20 token surged on the news, shooting up from $16.31 to $26.54 before settling back down to $19.73 as of press time.

Metapurse has previously commissioned virtual reality architecture group Voxel Architects to design virtual art museums in three digital worlds.

NFTs Christie's beeple

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.