Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as MetaKovan, spent $69.3 million on a non-fungible token earlier this year, but he's not very possessive about it.
The Indian entrepreneur and investor said in an interview with Bloomberg News that the beauty of an NFT is that everyone gets to enjoy it. He'd be happy if everyone downloaded a copy of Everydays: the First 5000 Days. The blockbuster price he paid helped bring attention to the growing market for NFTs, which has exploded in popularity since then. The potential of the technology and the numerous brands and celebrities that are piling in have attracted attention. It's been the subject of some questions about trading scandals, valuations and what an NFT purchase actually gives the buyer.
Sundaresan spoke to Bloomberg about his thoughts on NFT property rights and what he's watching next. Below are some highlights from the interview, edited for length and clarity.
Information wants to be free at the end of the day. You try to have paywalls, you try to do so many things. They have not done well on the internet, because they have methods of having information or data inside walled gardens of any kind of security.
If someone is releasing music, it's possible that it gets pirated. All these issues seem to be native to the internet. If you try to fight that, I don't think it'll be useful at all.
Instead of giving importance to that copy of the file, what NFTs do is to give importance to something else big. The idea that someone supported an artist at some time was a memorabilia.
If you have an NFT, I believe that everyone gets to enjoy it. There are a few people who pay for this production, and they get a credit for being part of this production. It's fine to download. I'm happy if someone were to download Beeple The 5000 Days for everyone in the world.
Are you involved with any big-name series likeCryptoPunks?
I'm not involved in CryptoPunks or Bored Ape Yacht Club.
I didn't understand what this would be or what it would become. We are trying to be inclusive in a way.
I want to figure out other ways of scaling the number of connections we have on the internet. These projects will have to figure out why they are limited to these many numbers, and what effect that will have on what they can do in the world.
Today, the most exciting area is Polkadot, which is part of the most exciting area. Polkadot is just a skeleton and there can be so many chains that attach to the skeleton and can scale themselves.
You can get back your DOT by participating in the auction where you lock up your DOT for a couple of years. You'll get rewarded with some of these tokens for that. It's a great way to think about capital allocation right now. I'm not looking to change my position, because I've been in Polkadot for a while now.
What do you think about Decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs? I'm closely watching them, which are just starting to come up in all parts of the world. There would have been an art collective of artists together doing some work. They're trying to be a DAO.
I think Wyoming has been leading the way - they've figured out a lot of things they can offer, and people are going to figure out how they can allow people to host DAOs in their home country. That's going to be the next phase because I feel like it will have a real impact on the world.
We'll see a lot of work with artists in the next four or five months, and we'll see a lot of that in the next four or five months.
We launched something on Instacart. It's a programmable music piece, but it was made by artists in India. 40 artists participated in this. The payment trickles out and gets out to everyone for every sale they figure out how to route it. I think it's a great model to look at how we bridge cultures from all over the world and present them in a global market.