Three Blockchains, One Collection: A Museum’s Five-Year NFT Record

On September 8, 2026, the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, Austria opens Collection Francisco Carolinum — 3 Blockchains, One Collection (through February 7, 2027, curated by Julia Staudach). It is the first time the museum shows its complete NFT holding — artworks collected since 2021 across three wallets on Ethereum, Tezos, and Bitcoin.

The lineage

In June 2021 the same museum ran Proof of Art (June 10–September 15, 2021), billed as the world’s first museum exhibition on the history of NFTs and digital art. It was curated by Jesse Damiani (@jessedamiani), co-curated by Fabian Müller and Markus Reindl, and staged both in the physical galleries and in Cryptovoxels, a blockchain-based virtual world. The museum began acquiring that same year and has kept collecting since — its new show describes the holding as continuously growing, with the most recent accession (Martin Lukas Ostachowski’s Noctilucent Memento #142) dated November 2025.

The 2026 continuity

The new exhibition repeats the 2021 experiment’s dual-venue structure: selected physical works hang beside their on-chain counterparts, and a second venue in the Cryptovoxels metaverse (the Digital Francisco Carolinum) mirrors the galleries. The curatorial framing treats the blockchain itself as an artistic medium — smart contracts as material, code as practice, works conceived and executed on-chain.

The roster

Participants span the field: Casey Reas (@reas), Rafaël Rozendaal, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Larva Labs, Kevin Abosch, Rhea Myers, Harm van den Dorpel (@harm), Primavera De Filippi (@primavera), Refik Anadol, the Yawanawá collaboration, Auriea Harvey (@auriea), Sasha Stiles (@sashastiles), and Martin Lukas Ostachowski. Ostachowski’s own practice maps onto the three-chain structure: Ethereum releases from 2018, Tezos editions later, and recursive Bitcoin ordinals in 2026.

The market contrast

The institutional backdrop makes the show legible. Christie’s closed its dedicated digital art department in September 2025 and folded digital into its 20th and 21st century sales, with two specialists let go. MoMA acquired eight CryptoPunks in December 2025 and received eight Chromie Squiggles from Erick Calderon (@snowfro) the same year. Against that, a provincial Austrian state museum with five unbroken years of buying across three chains is a different kind of data point: budget persistence, dated acquisitions, collection growth documented through the market trough.

The timing

The opening lands on the eve of Ars Electronica week (September 9–13, 2026), which this year runs under the themes “Future Begins” and “Negotiating Humanity.” The parallel ART NFT LINZ program — a co-production of ZKM Karlsruhe, OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH, and iMal Brussels — pulls further works from the same Francisco Carolinum collection (Kevin Abosch, Harm van den Dorpel, UBERMORGEN, Erwin Wurm), shows Lynn Hershman Leeson’s TeleNFT, and opens with a John Gerrard keynote on September 8. Curator-led tours of the new exhibition run September 9, October 22, and November 19.

Why it matters

Five years is now long enough to distinguish an institution that minted a headline in 2021 from one that built a collection. The Francisco Carolinum’s answer to “what does museum collecting of blockchain art look like over time” is concrete: three wallets, three chains, physical and virtual venues, and an accession record that continued past the hype cycle.