He spent $69 million on an NFT. Five years on, he believes in digital art more than ever

By Oscar Holland, CNN

Singapore (CNN) — It was pushing 4 a.m. when Vignesh Sundaresan bought one of the most expensive artworks in history. Wearing his favorite T-shirt for the occasion, he had stayed up through the night on his iMac, at home alone, watching rival bids trickle in. A row of Starbucks coffee cups lined the desk beside him; backup computers waited nearby, in case the Christie’s auction website stuttered at the crucial moment. It heaved under the weight of 22 million visitors who tuned in to watch the historic sale’s final moments.

Two weeks earlier, the auction had opened at just $100. Online bids moved slowly at first, but Indian crypto investor Sundaresan privately suspected they might eventually exceed $10 million. Then a sudden flurry of late offers — more than 180 from 33 different bidders in the final hour — saw the price soar far beyond anyone’s wildest predictions.

The artwork Sundaresan ultimately paid $69,346,250 for in March 2021 was not a Van Gogh or a Picasso. It was a jpeg called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” a collage of 5,000 satirical, often dystopian virtual drawings by Beeple, the moniker of a little-known South Carolinian graphic designer called Mike Winkelmann. Or more precisely: It was a non-fungible token (NFT) denoting ownership of the 319-megabyte image.

“After that, I decided I would never participate in an auction again,” Sundaresan recalled at his newly opened art gallery in Singapore, where he lives. “That pressure, the anxiety, being in that moment and being combative actually affects you.”

At the time of the auction, Singapore was in the grip of Covid-19 restrictions. So, even if Sundaresan, then aged 32, wanted to properly celebrate, he couldn’t “because it was illegal.” And he didn’t want to drink alone. Instead, he stayed up past dawn planning how he might display his latest acquisition, virtually, in the metaverse. “My goal was to build something around it. I was already planning which architect I should speak to,” he explained, adding: “For me, there was a larger strategy.”

This month marks five years since the record-breaking auction — one that Sundaresan said he is still “experiencing different consequences of, good and bad.” The NFT market may have crashed spectacularly in recent years, but his $69.3 million purchase remains the third-highest sum ever paid for the work of a living artist at auction, behind Jeff Koons’ $91.1 million “Rabbit” sculpture and a $90.3 million David Hockney painting of a pool scene. And the price for “Everydays” might have gone higher, still: Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun later claimed the auction site did not register his counteroffer, which would have extended the sale window.

Sundaresan demurs on whether he would have kept bidding. “It’s a very in-the-moment thing, you know? The competitiveness — you become a different person. It would have stopped somewhere, definitely,” he added, describing the sale as “a very painful process.”

NFT boom and bust

Soft-spoken and open about past missteps, the 37-year-old is neither the archetypal cryptobro nor a conventional old-money art patron. Growing up in Hosur, a small city in India’s Tamil Nadu state, he never visited museums as a child. Going to the movie theater was his “only exposure” to the arts, he said. Around age 12, he started coding from home, borrowing a computer when he didn’t have access to one of his own.

Building websites became Sundaresan’s window to the global economy — and a source of income. After graduating from high school, he briefly switched focus to study mechanical engineering in Dubai (“My parents were like, ‘Computers have no future,’” he joked), before returning to India to work as a technology consultant in Chennai. He first encountered Bitcoin in 2012 while researching ways to move money between two of his own trading accounts.

A string of crypto- and blockchain-related businesses soon followed. Over the next decade, he either founded or co-founded: a cryptocurrency exchange (Coins-E), a Bitcoin ATM network (BitAccess) and a decentralized lending platform (Lendroid Foundation). He was also an early investor in the blockchains Ethereum, Polkadot and Flow, moving from India to Canada and, later, Singapore, one of only two countries (along with Switzerland) whose regulators were, he felt, keeping up with the technology.

When Sundaresan made his historic purchase, the art market was in the early stages of a speculative NFT boom that now feels like a fever dream. The era of celebrities peddling cartoon apes was still to come, but the tokens — which use blockchain technology to verify ownership of digital assets — were already swapping hands for six- and seven-figure sums. The month prior, a tokenized gif of a cat flying through space (with a Pop-Tart for a body) had fetched the equivalent of $590,000. The NFT for a different Beeple artwork, depicting a naked, graffiti-strewn Donald Trump, had meanwhile sold for $6.6 million.

Crypto evangelists had, for years, heralded NFTs as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 15th-century printing press. By recording transactions on a blockchain’s incorruptible ledger, easily replicable images and videos could be collected, traded or sold for the first time, they argued. Christie’s decision to offer “Everydays” was the long-awaited signal of mainstream acceptance. It was also the first major auction to accept cryptocurrency as payment (Sundaresan settled his bill with 42,329 Ether, which would be worth over $98 million at today’s exchange rate).

In a Christie’s press release the next day, Sundaresan — then operating anonymously as MetaKovan, a username combining “metaverse” and the Tamil word for “king” — described Beeple’s collage as “the most valuable piece of art for this generation.” Its true worth, he added, was actually $1 billion. In a blog post, he later called the sale a “turning point in how we think about digital ownership, provenance and artistic labor in the internet age.”

Much has changed in the last five years, however. The collapse of the NFT market was almost as dramatic as its ascent. Between January and September 2022, monthly trading volumes dropped by 97%, according to a Bloomberg analysis of data from Dune Analytics. The next year, research into around 73,000 NFT collections, by dappGaml, estimated that more than 95% of them were essentially worthless.

Critics who had long compared the market to a Ponzi scheme, in which early investors profited from latecomers, basked in schadenfreude. Christie’s quietly closed its once-pioneering digital art department last year. “Every company has gone bankrupt in NFTs,” said Sundaresan, whose anecdotes are littered with collaborators and online platforms that are no longer in operation.

All of which begs the 69.3-million-dollar question: How much is “Everydays” worth today?

Its owner doesn’t have a definitive answer. Like any artwork, its value is defined only by what someone is willing to pay for it — and Sundaresan has no intention of finding out. “It’d be the last thing I would consider selling,” he said. Instead, he wants to “let it be” and see where things stand “in 20 years, or even a generation later.” In other words, the NFT’s true worth may only be realized once its place in art history is better understood. “It will have its value, but if you try to monetize it, it won’t,” Sundaresan offered, somewhat cryptically.

“Whenever I bought an NFT, I wrote it off,” he added, claiming that he never sold a single NFT from a personal collection of thousands. “So, in a way, I’ve made my peace.”

From record to reinvention

Today, Sundaresan divides his time between a digital asset management firm, Portkey Technologies, and his ongoing forays into digital art. But his latest venture, Padimai Art & Tech Studio, sees him migrate from a virtual world to a (comparatively) IRL one. Set in a converted warehouse beside a major container port in Singapore, the “artistic laboratory” invites visitors to view art through VR goggles hanging from the ceiling. “I’ve been such a digitally native person,” he said of his decision to open a gallery space. “I really find that I’m happier, I’m more peaceful, when life is physical.”

Sundaresan has undergone something of an art-world rebrand, too. At the time of the Beeple sale, his website described him as an “entrepreneur, coder and angel investor.” An accompanying photo showed him in a sharp gray suit, a luxury watch protruding conspicuously from its sleeve. On the day of our interview, however, he is wearing a flat cap, thick-rimmed glasses and a Hawaiian-style shirt pasted with the woodblock prints by the Edo-period Japanese painter, Hokusai. His official biography now positions him as a “blockchain technologist” who is “seeking art and related world-building experiences in the digital sphere.”

He is putting his crypto where his mouth is: Entrance to Padimai is free (when I first visited, a group of schoolchildren buzzed around the space), and Sundaresan has allocated enough budget to run the “non-revenue-generating” gallery — in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets — for the next three years. Padimai’s goal is not to sell art, but to “add meaning” to it, he said. “If you commission an artwork and keep it in your wallet, what’s the purpose of it?”

Sundaresan appears more curious about the innovations underpinning digital art than what it looks like, frequently enthusing over the ways technology and creativity intersect. Over the course of our near-two-hour interview, he describes things as “interesting” almost 50 times. He said he is drawn to commissioning art “that pushes experimental boundaries, on the tech side.” And he credits this evolving outlook to the man behind his gallery’s first VR experience: Olafur Eliasson.

The famous Icelandic-Danish artist first contacted Sundaresan in the immediate aftermath of the “Everydays” auction to learn about emerging technologies. “I didn’t even know who Olafur was, so I went into the call and my proposal to him was: ‘Why don’t you build something around the Beeple?’” Sundaresan recalled with a laugh, now recognizing the audacity of asking one of Europe’s most celebrated artists to help him display a jpeg of someone else’s work.

The pair nonetheless developed a friendship via dozens of Zoom calls. Sundaresan took Eliasson on a Metaverse tour and became “a student” of his famously experiential art-making practice. “He took that interest in me, which changed my life,” said Sundaresan, adding that the NFT market collapse also produced a “meaning crash” that left him questioning why he was so concerned with spectacle over substance. “I would have exploded at some point.”

In Eliasson’s “Your View Matter,” the only work in Padimai’s debut exhibition, visitors navigate a series of abstract spaces in virtual reality. Walls and ceilings flicker with Moiré patterns — the glitchy interference produced when you try to film a computer or TV screen — that change depending on where the viewer looks. The underlying code exists as a single-edition NFT, which constitutes the first acquisition in the museum’s nascent collection.

Cemented in art history

Sundaresan still looks at “Everydays” sometimes. He built a virtual viewing space in which his record-breaking jpeg appears 13 stories high. Using a VR headset and joystick he can navigate the collage’s surface, inspecting its 5,000 drawings in closer detail, as if scaling a building on a window-cleaning platform. He never made the experience public but allows friends to look whenever they ask to “see the Beeple.”

His original plan was more complex, however.

Sundaresan was an early adopter of NFTs, founding the investment fund Metapurse in 2017 and acquiring thousands of tokens for his personal collection. His NFTs mostly represented land in the metaverse (“I was quickly going down this path of becoming a virtual estate developer”) but he also acquired digital collectibles and artworks to display there. In 2019, he paid around $113,000 for an image of a Formula One car covered in diamonds, the highest price tag for an NFT that year.

“Back then, I was very hyper-capitalistic, and I was speculating when I bought the land,” he admitted. “I didn’t fully understand the implications. And when I bought art, also, I would think, ‘Oh, I’m buying this because it will have value.’”

He went on to exhibit “Everydays” in both a virtual metropolis, called Origin City, and a physical one — New York City, where Metapurse displayed it on screens at its Dreamverse festival in Manhattan. But his initial idea was to build an entire virtual experience around the artwork that could be fractionalized, turned into tokens and re-sold — potentially recouping up to 50% of his investment, he said.

It was a model Sundaresan had already piloted with Metapurse’s B20 tokens earlier in 2021. The offering gave investors a stake in a bundle of digital assets, including 20 Beeple NFTs (bought for a combined $2.2 million back in 2020), as well as a virtual museum housing them. Trading for under $2 each in mid-February 2021, the tokens surged in value a few weeks later — to over $29 on the day “Everydays” sold — amid growing hype around the artist. Sundaresan owned more than half of the 10 million tokens, sparking accusations that he had only made the record-breaking purchase to pump B20’s value. He insists he neither profited from the scheme nor ever sold any of his tokens, which now trade for under 5 cents.

Nevertheless, Sundaresan considered replicating the scheme for “Everydays.” He would have dubbed the new token “B5K.” But he said he wrote off the idea within weeks of the auction, burned by the “public criticism” and scrutiny he faced after revealing himself as the man behind the MetaKovan pseudonym.

“I took a month, or a month-and-a-half, to deeply think about it, and was like, ‘No, this is not what I’m meant to do.’ That’s when I decided, ‘OK, if I do this now, it will just be so spectacular and crash so badly.’”

Despite the market’s capitulation, Sundaresan distinguishes between NFTs as a speculative asset class and NFTs as an ownership mechanism. The problem with the boom was that it attempted to “financialize everything,” he argued. Sundaresan said he had completely stopped buying NFTs by the end of 2021, but maintains that minting them is self-evidently necessary for anyone creating, commissioning or collecting digital art.

“It marks the moment that an artwork becomes public,” he said, comparing a token’s creation to the act of framing a painting when it is finished. “If you’re a gallery selling new media, why would you not make it an NFT? It’s just better than a paper.”

Beeple, meanwhile, frequently uses an analogy from recent history: that the NFT market’s crash is no more indicative of NFTs’ demise than the collapse of the late-1990s dot-com bubble was of the death of the internet. “There’s the underlying technology — the underlying idea — and then there’s what people got really excited about for a second,” the artist added on a Zoom call, reflecting on the bubble that thrust him into the spotlight five years ago. “And those are two separate things.”

Now a well-known figure in contemporary art, Beeple is speaking from Charleston, South Carolina, where he operates a fully staffed 50,000-square-foot studio — thanks, in no small part, to Sundaresan’s record purchase. The artist is “still processing” the event that transformed his life. “Now, looking back, I have a bit more appreciation for the gravity of that moment, and how out of leftfield it came to the rest of the art world,” he said.

Beeple plans to visit Padimai on a trip to Singapore this year. But the man who put him among art history’s most valuable names has no plans to exhibit his $69.3-million jpeg at the gallery, saying it would not present the “right message” to visitors.

“People who walk in don’t even know this is an NFT, or what it cost,” Sundaresan said of his inaugural VR installation. “They are here to experience the artwork. That makes the artist — and the art — the focus, rather than the price.”

“Your View Matter” is showing at Padimai Art & Tech Studio, Singapore, until June 13, 2026.

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