NFC Summit Puts Art First at New Factory Site

The NFC Summit runs at Unicorn Factory Lisboa, Lisbon, June 4-6, 2026

In its fifth year of operation as a digital culture festival, the NFC Summit, with the Non Fungible Conference and its seven other constituent events, is moving to a new, larger, site where its program will be built around art. The whole summit will be housed for the first time at the Unicorn Factory Lisboa, a 50,000 sq m former agro-industrial complex in the docklands area of the Portuguese capital, with multiple spaces dedicated to art, from the central plaza to the NFC Art Factory hosted in an historic four-storey flour mill.

According to John Karp, founder of NFC Summit, working with the Unicorn complex, which is three to four times larger than the summit’s previous location in the city, has enabled him to plan conference events, hackathons, and exhibitions, in one close-knit indoor and outdoor connected space. 

In contrast to the FOMO-inducing side events that populate many fairs and biennials, the new space is a “five-minute-walk” environment designed to sustain the summit’s core culture, where a crypto founder might easily wander into an immersive art show or an artists’ panel discussion. 

It is a place where, in the words of the summit’s 2026 curatorial statement, written by Fanny Lakoubay, co-founder of 100 collectors, “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 [...], where visitors can move from digital art to AI to decentralized finance and back again, often without planning to”. 

For the first time, Arab Bank Switzerland (ABS), owners of a digital art collection in Geneva and backers for a fourth successive year of the Arab Bank Switzerland Digital Art Prize, are the main partner of the NFC Summit. ABS is working closely with NFC to make it a successful event, not least by building on the synergies between their respective communities.

Digital art has always been central to the summit, Karp tells Right Click Save, even in the opening iteration of 2022 with its NFT and PFP “madness”.  “Now, we’re going to a way that maybe resonates more for the art world: [to] try to create bridges between universes,” Karp says.

Karp hopes to address a long-standing issue where “the crypto world was seeing us as an art event, and the art world was seeing us as a crypto event.”

On the top floor of the Unicorn building, ABS is showing “SYSTEMS”, curated by Nina Roehrs, Art Advisor and Curator to Arab Bank Switzerland. The exhibition, whose theme was inspired by the industrial history of the flour mill building, where much of the 20th-century machinery is still intact, draws on ABS’s collection of digital art by a broad range of artists, not all of them Web3 practitioners. They include Larva Labs, Helena Sarin, Jack Butcher, Paul Seidler from Terra0, Kim Asendorf, Andreas Gysin and Sidi Vanetti, and Victoria Binschtock. In “SYSTEMS”, their work will be presented alongside that of the three finalists in the ABS Digital Art Prize: Gretchen Andrew, Jonas Lund, and Theo Triantafyllidis. 

“The new venue, [...] and the fact that we are increasing the relationship with Fanny and 100 collectors, as official curators, and also collaborating with Nina and Arab Bank Switzerland,” Karp says, “show a direction where we have a vehicle that is more easily understandable to the art world.”

For the Non Fungible Conference, Lakoubay is curating exhibitions of digital art on the other floors of the building and outside in the central plaza, where there will be mural displays, four freight containers housing solo shows by Jifra and Efdot supported by Opensea, NORMIES by serc and a group show by The Cult of Crypto Art, and a monumental three-meter-tall triptych sculpture by the artist Dmitri Cherniak, which will have a generative system running continuously, and act as a central focus of the conference.

For Karp, 2026 will be the year that the art offering at NFC matures. For Lakoubay, who discusses the 2026 edition and its renewed art focus with Karp in terms of a “Year Zero” or a “New Order”, working across the industrial complex is more than just having a bigger space for the event. It is, she says, a more connected and organized site, where everything is designed to converge on the central plaza that opens into different events: “an agora, where people can access the different subject matters of the whole summit”.

Each floor of the NFC Art Factory will have a dedicated focus.  “The top floor will be taken over by the ABS SYSTEMS exhibition,” she says, “followed by a floor showing the diversity of the blockchain and art space, and then the ground floor focusing on large  gallery presentations with ETERNO showing BOLDTRON and Vhils, DANAE with Eko33, Hash Gallery with Bard Ionson and The Bitcoin Art Society.” There will be solo artist shows such as Bryan Brinkman, gallery shows such as Cycol Gallery, community collections such as PEPEVAULT, with more to be announced; alongside a basement takeover by AI and the machines with RNA Studio, and Spirit Protocol and VTV. 

The presence of artists, curators, and collectors at the summit is key, Lakoubay says. “People don’t just come for the art, they also come to see each other, and most of the artists are also speaking.”

The artist and curator Grida is running a speakers program with contributions from curators including Roehrs, Lakoubay, Eleonora Brizi, Dominique Moulon, Georg Bak, and Micol Ap; the collectors and founders Benny Redbeard, Seth Goldstein, FrankNFT, and Sebastien Borget; and artists such as Operator, Serc, Musicalnetta, Simon Hudson from BottoDAO, Boris Eldagsen, Violetta Jones, Leo Caillard, Ivona Tau, Parin Heidari, Ender Diril, Ana Rosado, Stanza, Aida Boldeanu, Lars Ravn, Andrea Chiampo, Serra Bahar, Stina Gustafsson, Muhju, and Pauline Faieff.

The summit, which has established itself as a central annual gathering for the Web3 world as well as the wider community of digital artists, collectors and curators, takes place this year between two landmark events in the traditional art world’s European summer calendar: the opening of the Venice Biennale (May 4-9, 2026), and Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland (June 15–21, 2026). In Basel, ArtMeta, Basel Social Club, and House of Electronic Arts (HEK) are building on previous years’ digital art programs, while the main Art Basel fair will be presenting the third iteration of Zero 10, its new section dedicated to art of the digital era. 

NFC, spurred on by working in a new industrial space, Lakoubay says, is looking “to define a native way to display digital art”, and aiming to get away from gallery-like three-white-wall booths in order to “find our own system within the digital art ecosystem”.

Visitors, she says, “will see a gallery name, an artist name, a platform name, or a community name; [all] at the same level.” But the summit, she says, is not defined “against” the art market. Rather, “it stands on its own as a new experiment in how digital art can be experienced in real life”.

For Roehrs having “this beautiful building” provides a setting where ABS, which previously ran its annual prize in a villa at a distance from the summit, “could move in with NFC Lisbon and have a space in which we can present art in a way we would like to present it. And in a very unique way because there’s nothing more attractive, somehow, than escaping the white cube”.

ABS is also planning to have a visitors’ lounge area, open to all, as a place to sit and talk, on a floor where art and people will intermingle with the flour mill’s old machinery.

“NFC Summit has been one of the first festivals dedicated to crypto and crypto culture, and has always provided the framework for our Digital Art Prize,” says Rani Jabban, Deputy CEO of Arab Bank Switzerland. “We are delighted that the summit’s move allows us to come closer together geographically, and we believe it is important to support NFC Summit’s continued development.”

Lakoubay admits that, despite this year’s new focus, visitors might not like everything they see: “Some things will be successful and some things will not, but at least we're trying to [define] the best formats to showcase digital art in real life.”

“This is going to be fun,” Lakoubay says. “I think we’re bringing back the fun part that has been lost in the art world.”

The theme of “SYSTEMS”, and the choice of works from the ABS collection, Roehrs says, have given artists who applied for the prize “a feeling of what we are doing [and] how we are thinking about ‘systems’ and the show”. For the first time, works entered for the prize do not have to be minted as NFTs, immediately widening the range of potential applicants. 

The knowledge that the three shortlisted artists would be shown alongside artists such as Kim Asendorf, Linda Dounia, and Larva Labs, she says, offered prize applicants “a certain reassurance”, especially those from the new media world. The name of the winner of the ABS Digital Art Prize 2026, who receives a $10,000 prize and will have a work acquired by the ABS collection, will be announced in Lisbon on June 4, the first evening of the summit, with the awards ceremony held in a venue close by.