Twitter silently took away a perk available to the people who were subscribed to its paid Twitter Blue service. The feature removed, earlier allowed X users to set NFT (non-fungible tokens) as their profile pictures. This feature was initially rolled out in 2022 (pre-Musk era) and allowed subscribers to showcase NFTs minted on Ethereum (ERC-1155 or ERC-721 tokens) as profile pictures, which were displayed in the form of hexagonal avatars.
While the support has been removed, it still retains the hexagonal avatars of users that had previously set hexagonal avatars. TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta reports, that all NFT profile pictures related info has been quietly removed from the platform’s premium support page as well.
NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens are unique digital assets that represent ownership or proof of authenticity for a specific item or piece of content.
X is not the first platform to cut off support for the online tokens, which had gained huge popularity right after COVID. Platfoms such as Instagram and Facebook that had tried out NFTs on their platform also revoked support for the intangible tokens. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram — Meta, ended the support for NFTs in March 2023.
X’s move, along with Meta’s earlier decisions, suggests that social platforms are starting to drift away from their experiments with the non-fungible tokens which had taken the internet by storm.
This move by X shadows the move with other social networks like Instagram and Facebook, which experimented with NFTs but eventually discontinued their support. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, shut down its support for NFTs in March 2023. The removal of the NFT profile picture feature from Twitter Blue’s Premium support page indicates the beginning of a broader trend of social platforms winding down their NFT experiments.
The NFT market has experienced quite a lot of fluctuations in recent time. While the value of some high-priced tokens, such as those from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), has declined from its peak, the NFT market has shown signs of recovery. Recent trade volumes in the NFT market have exceeded $1.6 billion, according to NFT aggregator CryptoSlam.
This move by the Musk owned platform gives rise to questions concerning the longevity and mainstream adoption of NFT features on social media platforms. As various platforms rethink their strategies, the fate of NFT integrations in social networking platforms such as X remains in a dilemma signalling a dynamic landscape for digital assets in the online space.
Although there hasn’t been a lot of buzz surrounding these online tokens, quite a few brands that are future oriented have already harnessed the power of NFTs in their marketing strategies. Musicians alike have adopted NFTs by offering exclusive or concert experiences as assets in a token like form. The biggest example of the dawn of NFT is the PUMA campaign PumaDive during the 2023 World Cup.
The campaign invited participants to post their favourite cricket dive moments on the micro blogging platform using the #PUMADive. With the help of AI and computer vision software powered by Atthah, the campaign analysed and filtered a vast libary of dive images, and then calculated match accuracy with the Puma Dive and then produced a graphic that displayed the result to the participant. Only over the span of two months, the campaign registered a whopping half a million entries.
