The ownership saga of Beeple‘s most expensive work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, has finally reached its conclusion in court.
Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021) is an NFT work comprising 5000 digital images compiled by the digital artist Beeple. In 2021, it was sold for a whopping $69.3 million at Christie’s, becoming the most expensive NFT work by a long shot and starting the NFT mania that lasted the next couple of years.
However, its ownership story was even more interesting. The work was bought by the crypto fund Metapurse (a pun on Facebook’s Metaverse), based in Singapore. The fund was founded by two people who were only known by their pseudonyms at the time: Metakovan and Twobadour. By 2022, the two had split up.
But in 2022, Vignesh Sundaresan (alias Metakovan) sued Anand Venkatesarana (alias Twobadour). The claims involved trademark infringement, damage to business reputation, and essentially boiled down to the latter’s claims of involvement in the purchase of the NFT work. Sunderesan, however, maintained that Venktasewaran had nothing to do with the work’s purchase.
Now, a district court in New York has firmly affirmed that Sunderasan and his company, Portkey Technologies, are the real owners of Everydays: The First 5000 Days. Venkateswaran has been instructed to remove all references to the work or its purchase from his portfolio and company websites. Both parties signed a consent to the decision.
The NFT mania began in 2021 with a sudden spike in the demand for NFT digital artworks and high market value. However, as the art market stabilized post-pandemic, trends returned to the previous status quo, and the demand for NFTs kept dropping; in 2026, almost all of the NFT works sold were in the red.
