$69M SHOCKER
Record purchase at recent auction thrusts blockchain-based digital art into spotlight
It took a few minutes for Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran to realize that they’d parted with $69.3 million for a digital artwork stored in a JPEG file, coincidentally securing their place in art history.
“We weren’t sure we won,” said Venkateswaran, describing the nerve-wracking final moments of the online auction for a collage of 5,000 images by the artist known as Beeple. “We kept refreshing the page.”
The March 11 auction at Christie’s in London immediately made Beeple’s artwork one of the most expensive pieces ever sold by living artists, joining a swimming pool painting by David Hockney and astainless steel rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons.
Venkateswaran said he and his friend and business partner, Sundaresan, both in their 30s, are still coming to terms with their landmark purchase. They’ve also had to cope with outside concerns that the transaction could have been a convoluted scheme to inflate the value of the pair’s investment portfolio.
That’s because Venkateswaran and Sundaresan have invested heavily in a new form of digital collectible with the unwieldy name of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Based on cryptocurrency technology known as the blockchain, these digital items function as exclusive certificates of authenticity, making it possible to turn easily copied digital files into unique collectibles — sometimes ones worth millions of dollars.
The Beeple sale broke a record for the most expensive NFT ever sold and kick-started a global conversation about NFTs, their value and whether they are a lasting addition to the digital landscape. But the eye-popping sum involved drew global headlines and some suspicions that it could have been engineered for the publicity that drew more attention to NFTs, which could boost the value of the pair’s holdings.
The involvement of Christie’s, a centuries-old auction house, should be sufficient to reassure skeptics, Venkateswaran said from his home in India. “I think the bigger problem here is that people thought this would be impossible.”
That’s certainly the case with Beeple himself, who in real life is a digital artist named Mike Winkelmann. “This whole NFT thing was not something I saw coming, at all,” he said. During the auction, the artist was in his living room near Charleston, S.C., surrounded by family and a video crew, and said it felt like a “bomb went off in the room” as the bids quickly rose. Another bidder and cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Justin Sun, lost in the final seconds after the bids exceeded his previously set maximum.
The NFT market was already taking off, with transactions last year quadrupling to $250 million, according to a report by NonFungible.com, a website that tracks the market. The Beeple sale turbocharged that growth and helped transform NFTs from niche tokens mainly appealing to cryptocurrency nerds to a new type of digital asset that’s drawn mainstream attention from the art world, the music industry, sports and speculators.
The art world was not a common talking point for Sundaresan and Venkateswaran when they met in 2013 while working at The Hindu, a daily newspaper in Chennai, India. Sundaresan was a 20-something technology consultant; Venkateswaran was a journalist.
Both had humble upbringings.
Sundaresan couldn’t afford a laptop when he was learning to code, so he’d walk around with a flash drive and borrow his friends’ laptops, Venkateswaran said.
But by 2020, Sundaresan, now living in Singapore, had made himself rich on a series of cryptocurrency ventures and investments. With Sundaresan’s money and Venkateswaran’s analytical eye, they began exploring NFTs with a new fund called Metapurse.
Sundaresan, who declined to be interviewed, created the persona Metakovan as a reference to his affection for virtual worlds known as the “metaverse.” Venkateswaran, who lives with his wife and two kids, calls himself Twobadour. In a blog post last week the pair revealed their true identities and sought to dispel some of the mystery about their motivations.
It was in December that the Metapurse pair made their first big Beeple investment, buying 20 of his works for $2.2 million.
That was the precursor to March’s historic sale of Beeple’s “Everydays: the First 5000 Days,” a digital file combining works Beeple had created each day from May 2007 to the beginning of this year.