Two years after Twitter launched hexagonal NFT avatars, they’re gone: As reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by quite a few customers, the social media platform has quietly dropped the characteristic, and reverted all current NFT avatars to plain ones.
NFT avatars on Twitter (now formally referred to as X, however we’re not calling it that) debuted in January 2022 as an choice for Twitter Blue subscribers, who got the choice of linking their Twitter accounts to their crypto wallets. To tell apart NFT avatars from the functionally equivalent JPGs the remainder of us use, they have been additionally given hexagonal frames. Twitter was one of many solely mainstream platforms to undertake NFTs, and its transfer to combine them was a second of validation for these on the web who have been chasing this development.
The removing of NFT avatar help got here with out warning: References to it have been merely scrubbed from the Twitter Premium support page. Through the Wayback Machine, here is what it mentioned in October 2023:
NFT Profile Photos: We’re including NFTs as one among a number of methods to customise your profile so you possibly can showcase the NFTs you personal in a hex-shaped profile image in your account. After a short lived connection to your crypto pockets that permits you to arrange an NFT as your profile image, your digital asset shows in a particular hexagon form that identifies you because the proprietor of that NFT.
The TechCrunch report mentioned the hexagonal NFT avatar frames have been initially nonetheless in place after the change, however in response to the nftnow Twitter account, they’ve since been eliminated.
The response to the change from NFT boosters is about what you’d count on: Shock, disappointment, confusion, and a few faint hope from dedicated optimists that it merely means Twitter proprietor Elon Musk has plans for a distinct and ‘higher’ system. If that’s the case, he hasn’t provided any hints as to what it may be: There’s been no public remark from Musk or Twitter about why NFT avatar help was dropped.
It may be one thing so simple as NFT fatigue. Regardless of years of effort, NFTs have but to realize any kind of mainstream traction, and whereas the NFT market confirmed some small indicators of life following the large crash in 2023 that rendered a lot of them nugatory, the ground value—the bottom value of an NFT in a group—of the Bored Ape Yacht Membership appears to be tailing off but once more, and continues to be nowhere close to the lofty heights of valuation it reached in mid-2022.
There’s additionally the chance that Twitter is seeking to keep away from potential future complications. Lawsuits towards celebrities who flogged numerous NFT collections, together with Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, and Ronaldo, proceed to pile up, whereas the US Securities and Change Fee may be seeking to tighten up NFT regulation: In September 2023, it charged the creator of the Stoner Cats NFTs with “conducting an unregistered providing of crypto asset securities.”
For now, we’re left to guess: I reached out to Twitter for extra data and acquired the usual “Busy now, please verify again later” auto-reply (hey, a minimum of it is higher than the poop emoji). Regardless of the motive, I would name it the primary sensible transfer Twitter has made in a really very long time: I do not assume there was ever any actual expectation that paying for avatars would acquire widespread acceptance, however I additionally did not assume that horse armor would evolve right into a billion-dollar money-maker for the sport business. In that mild, I am glad to see this entire concept put down as soon as and for all.
