Elon Musk Trashes Twitter’s Latest NFT Integration

CEO of Tesla Elon Musk has aired his thoughts regarding Twitter’s new integration for non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures. Musk opined that Twitter’s attention could be better focused on curbing the activities of crypto scammers on the microblogging platform.

Twitter Wasting Resources For NFT Integration Says Musk

In a tweet published on Friday January 21, 2022, Tesla and SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Elon Musk questioned Twitter’s latest NFT profile photo integration. Musk tagged the move by the social media site as a misuse of resources. An excerpt from the tweet reads:

“This is annoying. Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?”

Musk’s comments possibly stem from the entrepreneur’s personal experience with crypto scams on Twitter. Back in 2020, scammers impersonating the Tesla CEO stole $2 million from unaware users via several Bitcoin (BTC) giveaway scams.

As previously reported by BTCManager, the incident was part of a larger coordinated social engineering attack. Several Twitter accounts belonging to highly influential figures and organizations such as Coinbase, Mike Bloomberg, and Vitalik Buterin were hacked and used to send out misleading tweets about a BTC giveaway.

Cryptocurrency-related scams are not isolated to Twitter alone. Back in August 2020, distributed ledger outfit Ripple filed a lawsuit against YouTube in a bid to combat growing scams involving the firm, its native token XRP, and CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Also, a report from cyber security company Tenable said that YouTube Live crypto scams stole over $8.9 million in October 2021 alone.

Twitter’s New NFT Feature

Twitter initially hinted at an NFT development back in September 2021 after the platform unveiled its tipping service with BTC as a supported payment option. The social media platform has now rolled out NFT profile photo integration for subscribers of its Twitter Blue service.

According to the announcement, Twitter’s new feature is powered by the Application Programming Interface (API) from popular marketplace OpenSea. This allows images to appear as part of verified NFT collections and associates Twitter accounts with the user’s public crypto wallet address. The announcement also explained that:

“This means your Twitter account will be associated with your current and historical crypto wallet transactions and holdings, including all other NFTs in that wallet, because this information is all available on the public blockchain.”

Currently, the feature is only available to Apple’s iOS users and supports web 3.0 wallets from MetaMask, Coinbase, Argent, Rainbow, Trust, and Ledger Live. However, Twitter assured its users that the hex-shaped profile photo can be seen across all platforms.