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.
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.
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.
The trademarks for Metakovan, Twobadour and MetaPurse all belonged to Portkey.
The settlement removes any remaining ambiguity.
Leave a Reply