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 often called X, however we’re not calling it that) debuted in January 2022 as an possibility 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 similar 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 elimination of NFT avatar assist got here with out warning: References to it have been merely scrubbed from the Twitter Premium support page. By way of the Wayback Machine, this is what it stated in October 2023:
NFT Profile Photos: We’re including NFTs as one among a number of methods to customise your profile so you may exhibit the NFTs you personal in a hex-shaped profile image in your account. After a brief connection to your crypto pockets that lets you 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 stated the hexagonal NFT avatar frames have been initially nonetheless in place after the change, however in accordance with 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. In that case, he hasn’t supplied any hints as to what it is perhaps: There’s been no public remark from Musk or Twitter about why NFT avatar assist was dropped.
It is perhaps one thing so simple as NFT fatigue. Regardless of years of effort, NFTs have but to realize any form of mainstream traction, and whereas the NFT market confirmed some small indicators of life following the huge crash in 2023 that rendered a lot of them nugatory, the ground value—the bottom value of an NFT in a set—of the Bored Ape Yacht Membership appears to be tailing off but once more, and remains to be nowhere close to the lofty heights of valuation it reached in mid-2022.
There’s additionally the chance that Twitter is trying to keep away from potential future complications. Lawsuits towards celebrities who flogged varied NFT collections, together with Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, and Ronaldo, proceed to pile up, whereas the US Securities and Alternate Fee might also be trying 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 info and bought the usual “Busy now, please verify again later” auto-reply (hey, a minimum of it is higher than the poop emoji). Regardless of the cause, I would name it the primary good transfer Twitter has made in a really very long time: I do not suppose there was ever any actual expectation that paying for avatars would achieve widespread acceptance, however I additionally did not suppose 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 thought put down as soon as and for all.