By Dominic Taylor-
Twitter Inc. TWTR -0.19% will start allowing some users to use nonfungible tokens as their profile pictures, jumping into a digital-goods business that has exploded over the past year.
The feature, launching on Thursday is being offered to users of Twitter’s Blue subscription service and signals the company’s biggest push so far into NFTs, which are tokens that act as vouchers of authenticity for virtual goods, such as digital art, that can be tracked and traded along blockchain technology, a type of digital ledger.
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Twitter is seeking to innovate its conversation and education around NFT, blockchain and crypto technology, according to Esther Crawford, the company’s product lead for the effort. NFTs, whose popularity has surged over the past year, have been sold mainly on platforms with less of a mainstream audience.
“Crypto is a key pillar of Twitter’s future. We want to support this growing interest among creators to use decentralized apps to manage virtual goods and currencies,” she said. “This is just still very early days for us, but we wanted to build something that was a utility for this community that they could start interacting with right now.”
The move is a clear symbol of social media conglomerate Meta’s new venture into enabling users to create, showcase, and sell NFTs on Facebook and Instagram, according to a report from The Financial Times.
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An NFT is, at heart, a way to claim ownership of a digital item like a JPG or a GIF via a unique address on the blockchain. And despite claims that these assets embody a decentralized forms of ownership, their legitimacy rests upon recognition from existing online platforms.
The plans are reportedly at an infant stage and teams at Facebook and Instagram are “readying” a feature that will let users display NFTs as their profile pictures, as well as working on a prototype to let users mint new NFTs. Others at Meta are reportedly discussing “launching a marketplace for users to buy and sell NFTs.”
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said last December that the company is “actively exploring NFTs and how we can make them more accessible to a wider audience,” while last October Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about how the metaverse will need to support “ownership of digital goods or NFTs.”
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have been gaining support in recent months with twitter in particular working on ways to showcase such blockchain-supported items, while Reddit launched its own collection of NFT avatars for users.
Although NFTs are much derided for their speculative value (prices rise and fall with shocking speed) and lack of security (they’re frequently stolen despite claims by some that they guarantee ownership), these assets will become more significant if existing tech giants choose to support them.
An NFT is, at heart, a way to claim ownership of a digital item like a JPG or a GIF via a unique address on the blockchain. And despite claims that these assets embody a decentralized forms of ownership, their legitimacy rests upon recognition from existing online platforms.
If Twitter or Instagram lets anyone copy and paste your JPG of a smoking chimp, who’s to say who really owns it? But if companies start enforcing ownership rights as signified by NFTs, they could become legitimate digital assets (at least on those platforms).
NFTs could also help influence in what the company has labelled the metaverse — a nebulous concept of interconnected virtual worlds, similar to promises of VR universes floated in the 1990s and before. That could potentially boost the value and importance of NFTs while simultaneously centralizing control over the assets.
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