Lemercier had issued six NFTs, but 53 editions.
#Nft energy consumption plus
Plus some artists were issuing multiple “editions” of their works, driving energy use even higher. There were other transactions to consider: the dozens of bids an artwork might receive, for example, and resales in the fast-flipping NFT market. The energy use was more complex, he found, than simply adding a token to a blockchain (a process called minting).
#Nft energy consumption full
Did Lemercier really know the full ecological costs? Akten decided to trace the blockchain activity associated with 18,000 NFT artworks. The experiment attracted the attention of a friend and fellow technology artist named Memo Akten, who was concerned to see his climate-conscious friend getting involved in blockchain. So Lemercier struck a compromise: heating was by far the biggest energy cost in his studio, so he would invest a portion of his crypto proceeds in better insulation. He liked the new model of ownership, which seemed to have fewer barriers to up-and-coming artists than the traditional art market. Surely, he reasoned, a handful of transactions wouldn’t amount to much, especially compared with his usual process of creating and shipping physical objects. Lemercier knew that energy was involved in anything blockchain, but he was unsure of the impact of issuing a set of artworks and struggled to find information. But this has been in the works for years, and there is no clear deadline for the switch. Ethereum’s developers have planned a shift to a less carbon-intensive form of security, called proof-of-stake, via a blueprint called Ethereum 2.0. Some mining hotspots popular because of cheap hydropower, such as Missoula, Montana, have banned new operations over concerns that even “clean” mining would push neighboring energy users to dirtier energy sources. But that number fluctuates seasonally, and in a global energy grid that mostly runs on fossil fuels, critics say energy use is energy use. Some estimates suggest as much as 70 percent of mining operations may be powered by clean sources. How exactly that energy use translates to carbon emissions is a hotly contested subject. The system is similar to the one that verifies Bitcoin, involving a network of computers that use advanced cryptography to decide whether transactions are valid-and in doing so uses energy on the scale of a small country. The major marketplaces for NFT art, which include MakersPlace, Nifty Gateway, and SuperRare, conduct their sales through Ethereum, which maintains a secure record of cryptocurrency and NFT transactions through a process called mining. The trade-off is that this model consumes lots of energy. So how can we build new platforms that are unsustainable?” Artists didn’t seem to understand the scope of this problem-Lemercier himself hadn’t-and the platforms making the sales didn’t seem interested in clarifying.
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But so was their role in emitting carbon. His fellow artists were becoming millionaires overnight as the cryptoart world exploded. The problem, as Lemercier saw it, went well beyond himself. Since then, the art has been resold, requiring another year’s worth of energy. That figure was equivalent to two years of energy use in Lemercier’s studio. The sale also consumed 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, as he later learned from a website called Cryptoart.WTF. The works were placed for auction on a website called Nifty Gateway, where they sold out in 10 seconds for thousands of dollars. In the clips, dark metallic polyhedrons rotate on loop and glisten-a reference to Lemercier’s installations in the physical world. The culprit was Lemercier’s first blockchain “drop.” The event involved the sale of six so-called nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which took the form of short videos inspired by the concept of platonic solids.