Twitter Rolls Out NFT Profile Pictures—Fueling A New Rat Race With Facebook

Is that a real Crypto Punk—or is someone, well, punking people?

Twitter hopes to provide the answer as it continues to enjoy a wellspring of interest on its platform around NFTs like Crypto Punks and other digital collectibles and cryptocurrencies. The social media company today debuted a feature that will verify a Twitter user’s ownership of a specific NFTs. The function allows someone to link their Ether wallet to their Twitter account. Once done, that person can display their NFTs as their Twitter profile pictures within a hexagonal frame, that hexagon serving the same function as an authentication sign post as Twitter’s blue check marks. (Without some sort of verification tool, a dozen people could use the same NFT in their profile pictures without anyone knowing who really owned it—such is the drawback to digital art.) For now these verified NFTs are available only to iPhone users who pay for Twitter’s premium subscription service, Twitter Blue.

It is a small but significant move for Twitter, which has sought to capitalize on founder Jack Dorsey’s interest in cryptocurrency and make its site a hotbed for discussion around crypto, increasingly one of the internet’s favorite topics. These NFT profile pictures are the first publicly unveiled project since Twitter formed a specific unit within the company—Twitter Crypto—designed to think about incorporating blockchain tech into the business. A few months earlier, Twitter announced it would allow bitcoin in its Tips function, where users can send money to a creator on the site.

The launch by Twitter comes at a conspicuous moment: The Financial Times today reported on Meta’s own plans for NFTs, amibitions that same distinctly like Twitter’s. In addition to allowing users to display NFTs, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is also reportedly looking to establish its own marketplace and mechanism for creating NFTs, which would place it in competition with a slew of existing NFT startups, most prominently OpenSea.

With this, Meta would like you think that its sheer size—around 3 billion users on Facebook and Instagram—will give it a leg up in this competition. If you buy that thinking unskeptically, there’s some virutal swampland I’d like to sell you, too: Facebook has a long track record of trying to innovate through straight up copy-catting, a tactic that has failed nearly every time it has tried.