Lisbon, June 4–6, 2026 | Unicorn Factory Lisboa | NFC Summit
The Origin
There is a question that John Karp has been asking for five years since the inception of Nonfungible Conference: how do you organize a digital art event in real life that is not elitist?
Not in opposition to traditional art events embracing digital art, but as an open door to a new digital-native system where everybody feels welcome (artists, collectors, enthusiasts), and welcome the next generation of digital art collectors.
NFC’s ambition has always been to touch anyone. Not just the traditional art collectors, not just the Web3 collectors who already know the names, but the person who comes in through the rest of the summit and wanders into the art spaces and stops in front of something they cannot explain.
Nonfungible Conference 2026 is the most serious attempt yet to make that ambition happen.
A New Kind of Art Event
NFC has never been an art event in the traditional sense. John describes it as something closer to a digital culture festival: a place where the crypto community, the art world, the AI researchers, the gamers, and the collectors all move through the same space and occasionally surprise each other. This year, for the first time, that space is organized around a dedicated art building, an outdoor central plaza, murals across the venue, and an exhibition program that runs throughout the 3 days of the event. Art is not a section of the program. It is the backbone of the event.
Fanny Lakoubay, who has led the NFC curatorial work as 100 collectors' founder, describes the new venue as organized like an agora: a central plaza that converges into dedicated spaces for each subject matter of NFC Summit, where visitors can move from digital art to AI to decentralized finance and back again, often without planning to. The buildings are physically connected, as the old mill's grain and flour systems required them to be. There is no separation between the worlds. There are only doors.
This year’s format is not built in reference to an existing model. It stands on its own as a temporary ecosystem for digital art to unfold in real life. In many ways, the format echoes earlier moments in digital and electronic art history, from Ars Electronica Festival to SIGGRAPH Art Show, ISEA – International Symposium on Electronic Art, or Transmediale. NFC operates in that same spirit, as a space where works can be unfinished, systems can evolve, and visitors can take part in the experience rather than observe a polished, finished product.
Across the site, exhibitions, performances, talks, and experiments coexist. Exhibitor labels do not separate galleries, artist studios, communities, platforms, or independent projects. They sit at the same level because that reflects how digital art is actually produced and experienced today. Artists are present throughout, on stage, in conversation, spending time with visitors. That feels different, but here it is simply how things work.
“The institutions that have defined how art is shown will innovate more slowly. They have reasons to. NFC does not have those reasons. Each edition has been an attempt to ask what the native format for digital art in real life actually looks like, because the answer is not yet settled, and the only way to find it is to try things, publicly, at scale, and learn from what works.
This is the fifth edition. It is also, in many ways, year zero.”
On the Long View
John has often spoken about NFC with a twenty-year horizon. He’s even told his children they may one day help run it. When things get difficult, his instinct is not to step back or change course, but to go deeper, to commit more, to build further.
Art has always represented a big part of NFC’s focus, which allowed the event to survive the tough years. That is not an accident. It is a commitment, made over years, that the cultural pillar is also the structural one, the central pillar. What makes it worth saving is the ambition underneath it: the belief that digital art can touch anyone, that the collector community is larger than the people who already think they belong to it, that the bridges between the crypto world and the art world and the gaming world and the pop culture world are real and worth building.
This year, those connections take form in space. In the corridors of the Fábrica de Moagem, the paths between the container galleries and the grand hall, the stairs from the rave cave to the systems curation on the top floor. On the plaza where everyone converges before going their separate ways.
We have done our best to organize the chaos as elegantly as we can.
What happens next is up to you.
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