Lemercier, HEK, and the 2021 NFT Energy Backlash — Five Years On

Five years ago, on February 17, 2021, French artist Joanie Lemercier canceled his second Nifty Gateway drop on launch day and published “The problem of (Ethereum) CryptoArt” — the essay that, alongside Memo Akten’s “The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt,” set off the 2021 NFT energy backlash. Today his exhibition Thresholds is running at HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, the same museum spending 2026 on a blockchain-arts partnership with the Tezos Foundation.

The essay, with its numbers

Lemercier had already sold his first NFT series — 6 works, 53 editions on Nifty Gateway — gone in roughly 10 seconds. He then asked the platform for the release’s energy data. The platform declined, repeatedly. An independent analysis by Offsetra put each edition near 80kg of CO2, compounding with every resale.

Two lines from the essay still stand as the clearest numbers the whole NFT-energy fight produced:

“my release of 6 CryptoArt works consumed in 10 seconds more electricity than the entire studio over the past 2 years”

“It will take a tree 12 years to offset the minting of a single NFT”

Context: Lemercier had spent years cutting his own studio electricity draw roughly 10% annually — 4,618 kWh in 2018, targeting under 3,800 by 2020. Memo Akten built cryptoart.wtf so anyone could run a wallet through the calculator. The New York Times covered the backlash on April 13, 2021.

What the pressure produced

• HicEtNunc, on proof-of-stake Tezos, passed 100,000 NFTs minted in under 3 months by May 2021 — more daily users than OpenSea at the time, per Lemercier’s own essay updates.
• cleannfts.org counted 50 eco-friendly platforms by July 2021.
• The same month’s update pegged PoS and Layer 2 at a 1,000x+ cut in per-transaction impact.
• Ethereum completed the Merge in September 2022.

The essay’s demands were transparency, scaling, and minimal on-chain transactions. The market eventually delivered most of them.

The 2026 side

In January 2026, HEK and the Tezos Foundation announced a year-long partnership: exhibitions on virtual.hek, artwork releases with objkt.com, and NFT-preservation training at ZKM. Thresholds — two decades of light grids, water, and plotter works, with new pieces premiering — runs in that building through November 15, under the title “On the values we set and the limits we cross.”

The practice stayed consistent, too. In April 2026, Lemercier and Juliette Bibasse sailed from Europe to the US for a project, skipping the flight at real personal cost. @cyrus, who met them there: “They opted to sail over to the US from Europe at great personal expense, but massively reduced carbon cost.”

Why it matters

The 2021 backlash is usually remembered as a fight the market shrugged off. The record reads differently: the critic’s numbers held, the infrastructure moved (PoS, L2, cleanNFT platforms), and the critic’s own practice — measurable, low-draw, physical light work — never depended on the boom. A museum that spends 2026 preserving blockchain art and a studio that once canceled its own drop now share an address. Both facts belong to the same history.

Sources: joanielemercier.com “The problem of (Ethereum) CryptoArt” (Feb 17, 2021, incl. July 2021 updates); hek.ch exhibition page; NYTimes, April 13, 2021.