I have found him.

He is the one who turned a $5000 investment into a billion dollars.

He is the one who paid $70 million for a virtual piece of art.

And I'm also the one who came from South India and started with nothing.

For the first time ever, I want to tell you the story of MetaKovan.

This guy from South India did not grow up with money.

In fact, for most of his life, he could not afford to buy a laptop.

He could only afford to buy a flash drive where he kept all his files.

At night, I used to borrow my friend's laptop,

when then they're just going to sleep.

And then I used to use my pen drive and learn how to code.

And on the Internet, he saw opportunity.

So he learned how to code and how to build websites.

Simple websites that do simple tasks.

So, I remember one of the websites I built on which anyone could hire a freelancer for $10.

But you know, that didn't go very well. It failed.

In total,

he built 54 websites and 51 of them were complete failures.

Until one day he stumbled upon Bitcoin.

He immediately was drawn to the idea and realized that this Bitcoin technology could be big, really big.

It was a global idea and it had people who are passionate about it from all over the world.

That really made me feel this is going to be really big.

So, he adopted bitcoin, ethereum, crypto and blockchain, even when everybody said this was a fad.

Anything that's new, is initially rejected, right?

Like they say, 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 and immediately my brain goes, "maybe we should try it," right?

Eight years ago, MetaKovan believed in bitcoin so much that he put every little saving he had into it

and invested all his time in building bitcoin companies.

So I invested all my time on bitcoin and trying to build something on top of it and thereby learning more about it.

Over the years, his bet took off and he went from being a broke software engineer to a billionaire crypto holder.

But don't expect the lifestyle of a billionaire because in reality nothing in his life has changed.

He owns zero cars, zero houses and zero stocks.

99.9% of everything he owns is still in crypto.

And that's how much I believe in it

This guy owns nothing in the real world, but he owns a lot in the virtual one because he believes everything is going virtual.

Money is virtual, land is virtual, and art is virtual.

Apparently, his jacket is also crypto.

How exactly is this crypto?

Actually, there are only 40 pieces of this in the world,

and this, they call it a Genesis edition, right.

And this is attached to the blockchain.

There's an address here, right?

So if you go on the blockchain and type this address, you will see the... you'll see that that's an NFT.

And you'll see that I own it through my address.

And there's an RFID chip right here.

Oh, my God!

-What? -Yeah.

And how much is this jacket?

I paid $600.

That's why last week he made headlines for buying digital art for $70 million from an artist in America.

69 million.

I think it probably means digital artists here to stay.

I'm going to Disney World.

It's the most expensive virtual purchase ever.

What went through your mind when you click buy?

At the auction, my mind was, you know, like, I had nothing in my mind.

I was, okay...

I'm going for it.

That's it.

And, actually, the funny part is a lot of people think I was nervous and stuff, I was not.

I knew this was happening and I had to do it.

So I did it.

My fund, which is metapurse.

We are planning to build this monument in the metapurse, which is a virtual space.

So we have land there, and we're going to build a huge monument and put this art there, so that people can enjoy the 440 million pixel art in its true form because it's a digitally native picture.

For this guy, buying a $70 million piece of crypto art was not just an investment.

It was an act of support.

He wants to support creators, artists, singers, musicians, people from all around the world.

From any race, any gender, any color.

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.

Time and again, whenever I've been rejected from something, like an investor or someone, they always tell me, I don't have pedigree.

And I hate that because you never gave me a chance, right?

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.

If it wasn't obvious by now...

This is not about money.

This is about decentralization.

Decentralization is the idea that value will not come only from the West.

It will come from the rest.

The next Gucci will not come from Italy.

It'll come from Jordan.

The next bank will not come from New York.

It'll come from Vietnam, and the next billionaire will not come from San Francisco.

They will come from South India.