Twitter’s long-awaited hexagonal profile pictures that give bragging rights to NFT HOLDers is here — but not everyone loves it

• Twitter has finally gone live with hexagonal profile pictures that give bragging rights to owners of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
• The feature is only available to paid subscribers of Twitter Blue, which costs $2.99 per month.
• Not everyone, like tech billionaire Elon Musk and others, are onboard with the hype.

Twitter’s long-awaited feature to give users bragging rights over their non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has finally gone live.

The social network founded by Bitcoin maximalist Jack Dorsey — who recently resigned from his position as CEO to focus on his other burgeoning company, Block — has today enabled the feature of setting NFTs as profile pictures, for all paid subscribers of Twitter Blue.

If Twitter is able to verify that a user owns a particular NFT avatar, then their Twitter profile picture will be framed within a hexagon, instead of the usual circle. This will change only the user’s profile picture, while leaving all their other profile details intact.

While most users seem to be onboard with Twitter’s new plan thus far, there are those with doubt. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, for instance, believes that the new feature is ‘annoying’. And, his issue seems to be with the allocation of resources.

Often a victim of scammers pretending to be him, Musk believes that the engineering power could have been better spent on designing a solutions to keep such fraudulent activity at bay.

How do NFT profile pictures work on Twitter?

For now, non-fungible token (NFT) avatars in the JPEG and PNG image formats are supported. The avatar will be loaded from an NFT platform such as OpenSea, which can verify who owns an NFT. Those who own many NFTs and are happy to announce it to the world, may need to wait for the rumoured Twitter Collectibles feature.

The NFT-as-profile feature is a ‘Labs’, or experimental feature that can be enabled by interested subscribers. To use the feature, you’ll need to connect a supported crypto wallet to Twitter. Twitter will remember the public crypto wallet address, so if you sell the NFT when it is still set as your profile picture, it won’t display ownership information anymore.

The next ‘blue tick’

Twitter has offered ‘Blue’ as a premium subscription that costs $2.99 a month, since June 2021. It offers users the ability to undo tweets, find relevant articles and getting to test out new features being developed by Twitter Blue Labs — like the hexagonal profile picture frames for NFT owners. And, hype has placed hexagonal profiles to be the next “blue tick”, in terms of Twitter prestige.

For a feature that debuted a few hours ago today, criticism has been mounting as well — for reasons that go beyond Musk’s annoyance. For one, getting NFT details including the image relies upon OpenSea, so Twitter Blue users could possibly lose functionality if OpenSea has server trouble. Secondly, Twitter does not restrict NFTs to verified collections, so valuable avatars could be recreated by anyone.

For now, the only consolation is the roadblock in the way of those who simply right-click an avatar to save and upload as their own profile picture. These users will get a circle around their profile, and not the hexagonal frame that proves they genuinely own the corresponding NFT.

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