How two friends made art history buying a $70M digital work
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-racking 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 well-known swimming pool painting by David Hockney and an iconic stainless 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 tens of 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 existing...
