The Economist magazine plans to sell its DeFi front cover as an NFT

The Economist, the venerable British magazine, has announced a plan to auction off the front cover of its September 18 edition as a non-fungible token (or NFT).

The cover — which parodied a scene from Alice in Wonderland by placing Alice and the white rabbit on the verge of a rabbit hole filled with tokens — will be sold on October 25. It was converted into an NFT with the help of the platform Foundation.

The auction will be the first time The Economist has issued an NFT, but it isn’t the first time an NFT has been put up for grabs by a major news organization. A column in the New York Times was purchased for a whopping $560,000 in March. Historic posts on Twitter have also been minted and sold as NFTs for startlingly high sums.

The Economist said in a press release that its aim is to showcase the potential of decentralized technology.

Proceeds from the sale — minus fees, transactions costs and taxes — will go The Economist Educational Foundation (TEEF), an independent charity focused on news. The magazine will retain a 10% stake in the royalties generated by future secondary sales of the NFT, with proceeds also going to TEEF.

The artwork for the DeFi cover, which was entitled “Down the rabbit hole: The promise and perils of decentralised finance,” was produced by Justin Metz, a British artist, with help from The Economist’s cover designer Graeme James.

“By selling our ‘Down the rabbit hole’ cover as an NFT we are now, in our own small way, journeying down the rabbit hole ourselves, in a fun experiment that will hopefully also raise money for a worthwhile cause,” said Alice Fulwood, a finance correspondent at the magazine.