When Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold for a record $69.3 million at Christie’s in 2021, the winning buyer was quick to reveal itself: a Singapore-based crypto fund called Metapurse, which was founded by a man going by the pseudonym Metakovan, ostensibly with the help of another person who went by the pseudonym Twobadour.
By 2022, Metakovan and Twobadour (real names: Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran, respectively) had split up. A year later, Sundaresan and his company, Portkey Technologies, sued Venkateswaran for trademark infringement, injury to business reputation, and dilution, related to the latter’s claims of being involved in the purchase of Everydays. Sundaresan claimed that Venkateswaran had nothing to do with the purchase, and had been only an independent contractor at Metapurse at the time.
That dispute came to a conclusion this past January, when J. Paul Oetken, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, approved a final judgment upon consent between the two parties. The agreement established that Venkateswaran is legally prohibited from claiming or suggesting that he was responsible for or involved in the purchase of Everydays, or from adding his name or likeness to websites or online profiles associated with Portkey, Metapurse, Metakovan, Sundaresan, or even Twobadour—Venkateswaran’s pseudonym while working as an independent contractor at Metapurse. The agreement was also signed by Sundaresan and Venkateswaran.
Earlier this month, Venkateswaran submitted a report to the court confirming compliance with the decision, which included unfollowing or leaving all Portkey social media profiles and paying an undisclosed amount to Sundaresan and Portkey, and attempting to get third-party websites to correct biographical information that connected Venkateswaran to the purchase.
So, if anyone was still wondering who owns Everydays, there you have it: Sundaresan.
Meanwhile, the NFT market has collapsed. Also in January, Nifty Gateway, one of the earliest and most high-profile online NFT marketplaces, announced that it would close. Last year, Christie’s shuttered its digital art department, while Sotheby’s reduced its Metaverse team in 2024. And a 2023 report found that 95 percent of NFTs were worthless; as lawsuits progress against celebrities who hawked NFTs during the peak, it is all but certain that their worth has continued to sink.
Artnet News first reported news of the lawsuit settlement.
