When Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold at Christie’s in March 2021 for $69.3 million, the art world’s first and most urgent question was simple: who bought it? The answer, it turned out, was complicated or at least someone wanted it to appear that way. A lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York in 2023 is now settled, and the record has been corrected.
Vignesh Sundaresan bought the artwork. His company, Portkey Technologies, made all the decisions. That’s now legally established. The backstory is one of the odder footnotes of the NFT era. Shortly after the Christie’s sale, a pseudonymous duo emerged to claim the acquisition of Metakovan and Twobadour, operating through MetaPurse, a crypto-native investment fund that presented itself as a visionary vehicle for democratising art ownership and redistributing cultural power from West to Rest—high-minded stuff. The pair eventually unmasked themselves as Sundaresan and his associate Anand Venkateswaran. For a period, the two were fixtures on the conference circuit and podcast rounds, jointly evangelising the transformative potential of NFTs and the particular significance of the Beeple purchase.
Then, in 2022, they split. Venkateswaran said he was stepping down to write a memoir. Sundaresan said he looked forward to reading it. Amicable enough on the surface. It didn’t stay that way. In June 2023, Sundaresan and Portkey sued Venkateswaran for trademark infringement and for falsely representing his role in the Beeple acquisition. The claim was pointed: Venkateswaran had spent the better part of a year trading on his association with MetaPurse and the Christie’s sale — appearing on panels and lending credibility to his own NFT ventures — while misrepresenting what he actually was: an independent contractor responsible for marketing and communications. Nothing more. The trademarks for Metakovan, Twobadour and MetaPurse all belonged to Portkey. Venkateswaran, the suit argued, had been leveraging assets that weren’t his.
The settlement removes any remaining ambiguity. A statement issued by Venkateswaran confirms that Sundaresan “exclusively purchased” the Beeple NFT, that he “made all decisions regarding the purchase,” and that Venkateswaran “did not have any decision-making or management authority over those purchases.” In addition to an undisclosed financial settlement, Venkateswaran is prohibited from describing himself as founder, co-founder, creator, co-creator, steward or co-steward or any number of similar formulations of Twobadour, MetaPurse or Metakovan. He is required to post clarifications on his own social media and to contact nearly fifty third-party film festivals, blockchain conferences, YouTube channels, and online publications, asking them to amend descriptions of his role. Many have complied by simply removing the relevant pages.
When the lawsuit was filed, none of the noise-makers was there. The timing was bad as the NFT market began to collapse, roughly 90% from its 2021–2022 peak. The cultural moment that made a $69 million JPEG feel like the future has passed with a speed that still seems remarkable in retrospect. Beeple himself has moved on, currently best known for those robot dogs wearing billionaires’ faces, which are doing the rounds of institutional venues and generating the kind of attention his NFT work once did. Sundaresan has opened an experimental art and technology space in Singapore, whose first offering was a VR work by Olafur Eliasson, minted as an NFT. The loop, apparently, remains unbroken.
The lawsuit is like a dispatch from a previous era, which, in the accelerated chronology of the digital art world, 2021 is more or less. The question of who bought the most expensive NFT ever sold has been answered, definitively and under legal compulsion. Whether anyone still cares quite as much as they would have in 2021 is another matter entirely.