Lawsuit Settles Who Really Bought Beeple's $69 Million NFT

Nearly five years after Beeple's“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” detonated the auction market, the identity of the person who actually authorized the $69.3 million purchase has been formally clarified in court.

A settlement finalized in late January resolved a lawsuit filed in 2023 in the Southern District of New York by Vignesh Sundaresan and his company Portkey Technologies against Anand Venkateswaran, a former independent contractor. The agreement includes a statement from Venkateswaran acknowledging that Sundaresan“exclusively purchased” the Beeple NFT and that Sundaresan made all decisions regarding that acquisition and any other NFT purchases for Portkey or MetaPurse.

The case reaches back to the immediate aftermath of Christie's March 2021 sale, when a pseudonymous pair, Metakovan and Twobadour, publicly claimed credit for the record-setting NFT through MetaPurse, described as a crypto-native investment fund. The duo later identified themselves as Sundaresan and Venkateswaran, and their public messaging framed the purchase as part of a broader effort to reshape how art circulates globally.

By 2022, the partnership had ended. The split initially appeared cordial, with Venkateswaran saying he was stepping away to write a memoir and Sundaresan expressing interest in reading it. But in June 2023, Sundaresan and Portkey sued, alleging trademark infringement and false claims about Venkateswaran's involvement in the Beeple purchase.

At the center of the complaint was the contention that Venkateswaran had spent months leveraging his association with MetaPurse and the Christie's headline to promote his own NFT-related businesses, including appearances on podcasts and conference panels. Portkey argued that the trademarks for Metakovan, Twobadour, and MetaPurse belonged to the company, and that Venkateswaran's role had been limited to marketing and communications work as an independent contractor.

The settlement's language is unusually direct for a dispute that, in practice, was about reputational ownership as much as legal ownership. Venkateswaran's statement specifies that he had“no decision-making or management authority” over the Beeple purchase or other NFT acquisitions made for Portkey or MetaPurse.

The agreement also imposes restrictions on how Venkateswaran can describe his relationship to the entities at issue. He is prohibited from claiming he was the founder, co-founder, creator, co-creator, christener, co-christener, steward, or co-steward of Twobadour, Metakovan, or MetaPurse, among other descriptors.

In addition, Venkateswaran is required to post corrective statements on his social media accounts clarifying his prior role at Portkey and to contact third-party websites to request updates to biographical descriptions that overstate his involvement. The list spans nearly 50 outside parties, including film festivals, blockchain events, YouTube channels, and online publications. According to the settlement's account, many of those pages have already been removed or amended.

Financial terms were not fully disclosed. The settlement includes an undisclosed payment.

The resolution arrives in a markedly different climate from the one that produced the Beeple sale. The NFT market has fallen roughly 90 percent from its 2023 peak, and the cultural heat that once surrounded high-profile JPEGs has cooled into a more fragmented ecosystem of experiments, brand-building, and niche collecting. Sundaresan, for his part, has moved on to new initiatives, including the opening of an experimental art and technology space in Singapore late last year. Its first offering was a virtual reality experience by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967), minted as an NFT.

For the art market, the settlement closes a lingering footnote from the boom years: the most famous NFT purchase of the era now has a single, unambiguous buyer attached to it - and a legal record to match.

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