Playboy Is Minting NFTs on the ‘Art of Gender and Sexuality’

Playboy said Wednesday it’s launching a non-fungible token (NFT) series to celebrate the brand’s editorial values of gender and sexuality, free speech, equality and pleasure.

In partnership with Sevens Foundation, a non-profit that helps digital artists create and exhibit NFTs, Playboy will choose 50 winning submissions for each series, mint them and promote them on social media.

Submissions for the first in the series, “The Art of Gender and Sexuality,” open today and close Oct. 1. In November, winning artists will have their work showcased at the NFT.NYC conference.

This is not Playboy’s first foray into the NFT space.

In May, the company collaborated with digital artist Slimesunday to release an NFT collection called “Liquid Summer” featuring archival photographs of Playboy model Lenna Sjööblom – the so-called “First Lady of the Internet.”

In August, Playboy posted articles teaching artists how to mint NFTs and laid out the timeline of Playboy’s NFT history dating back to March, when the brand began collecting NFTs with Beeple’s “Bull Run.”

Playboy’s history with bitcoin dates back even further: In 2018, Playboy TV began accepting bitcoin payments. In June, bitcoin payments expanded to Playboy.com.

For Liz Suman, Playboy’s vice president of art curation and editorial, the brand’s interest in crypto and NFTs are a natural fit for a company with a nearly 70-year history of censorship resistance.

“We’ve always been a place that champions art in sometimes controversial ways,” Suman told CoinDesk. “We really see NFTs as the frontier of creative expression going forward.”

Suman told CoinDesk that Playboy’s curatorial panel will prioritize submissions from emerging and underrepresented digital artists, including women and non-binary artists and artists with small social media followings.