Twitter Blue just announced NFT pfp. Other Big Techs will follow too.
What’s happening?
Twitter just announced ‘NFT profile picture’ about an hour ago.
It means users of Twitter Blue — its paid model — can now connect their wallet and use the NFTs that they own as a profile picture.
Using an NFT as a profile picture has been a long culture now among NFT holders. It has been one of the most exciting and obvious ways to ‘brag’ about some million dollars .jpeg file that one owns.
What changed?
It’s VERIFIED. So far, anyone could have ‘right click and save’d the NFT art and use it as their profile picture. Even the real owners had to do it that way. Let’s say there are three people using the same NFT art as their profile picture. There has been no way to tell from the profile picture page which one of them holds the real ownership of that picture.
None of the traditional social media platforms offered the function to connect the wallet (which contains the address that holds crypto assets including NFTs) and verify it.
Now profile pictures can represent WHAT YOU OWN, which represent WHO YOU ARE in the NFT space.
Let’s see how did Twitter implemented this. You can first watch the video that Twitter posted.
When the user attempts to set up a profile picture on Twitter, now they have a new option: ‘Choose NFT’
Then it connects your wallet, let you choose any NFTs you may own, and set it up as you Twitter profile picture with a HEXAGON frame.
Yes, it’s seemingly using a HEXAGON frame for the NFT profile pictures which sets a visual distinction from the traditional, unverified profile picture that was in circular frame.
In the next few days, we will see tens of thousands of grown ups getting excited about how they spent millions of dollars just to change their profile picture from circle to hexagon. hahaha
Can’t someone just save an image, mint it themselves, and use it to verify?
To prevent the cheap tricks, Twitter actually pulls the entire metadata about the NFT and displays it on Twitter app.
The address of the creator of the NFT, owner, the project description, and even properties of the NFT!
You can see all this information just by clicking on any user’s verified NFT profile.
It means users will now be judging your profile picture not only by its look but by its price and rarity as well.
*Again, all of this functions are limited to Twitter Blue users. Blue is Twitter’s paid version.
Why would/should other SNS platforms pursue the same strategy?
As soon as Twitter Blue dropped this new function, NFT discords started to discuss joining Twitter Blue just for this. There are tens of thousands of active users on each discord channel for each NFT project.
These users already paying $$$ for the NFT. Adding $2.99/mo is a joke.
All they have to do, in order to get these free money from the users, is to add the verified pfp function (For now). Easily satisfiable needs for those who are willing to, or dying to pay.
Therefore I can imagine seeing these feature on every traditional SNS platforms sooner or later. It will be a new normal to check out how much each other’s profile picture is and how rare they are.
