The NFT Trend and Twitter

Recently, the popular social media platform Twitter announced a brand new feature that allows the paying Twitter Blue subscribers on iOS devices to officially link their non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to their profile pictures.

Once NFT owners link their tokens to their accounts, they can choose to display their NFT on their profile picture on the platform. Additionally, the platform will display the profile picture with a hexagonal border instead of the usual circle shape, and other users will also be able to click on the profile photo to get more information on the NFT.

According to Twitter’s press release, this new feature will provide users with a user-friendly and seamless way to verify their ownership of NFTs. They’re able to directly connect their crypto wallets to the social media platform, and choose which NFT they want to display as their profile picture.

How The Trend Started

This move from Twitter arrived after a popular trend developed of NFT owners using the images that are linked to their tokens as their profile pictures on social media platforms. The most popular in this NFT trend was the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is a collection of about 10,000 different digital images of apes that are living on the Ethereum blockchain.

However, once the NFT owners started showing their Bored Ape photos on their profile, plenty of other users joined in on the trend by simply right-clicking and downloading the images, and putting them on their own profiles too. But this started an online battle between the people that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to own the tokens and the people that were simply downloading the same images.

Limitations

Once the trend started, Twitter understood the prevalence of users that owned NFTs was large and decided to integrate the new feature. The feature does come with some limitations, notably, it currently only works with NFTs that have been minted on the Ethereum blockchain. The platform is planning to integrate other blockchains in the future after Ethereum is fully integrated and working.

Additionally, if any NFT owners want to put their token on their profile pictures, they have to use one of six cryptocurrency wallets where they can store their NFTs, including Coinbase Wallet, Trust, Rainbow, Argent, MetaMask, and Ledger Live.

Constraints

About a day after Twitter announced the new NFT feature, plenty of users found that there was a workaround and that even if they didn’t own an NFT, they could still get their profile picture to appear in the same way as the accounts showing a token. All they had to do was upload whatever photo they wanted to the NFT marketplace Rarible, and mint the photo on the Ethereum blockchain by sending it to a crypto wallet they own. They then had to link that wallet to their accounts. This way, they didn’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, while still getting the same perks as the users that did.