Blocked

How could we resist Twitter’s new, premium NFT profile pic option?

Easily. The answer is: Very easily.

Hey, remember Twitter Blue? Of course you don’t, even though the premium social media upgrade launched barely six months back and only just initiated its stateside rollout in November. Don’t worry, we don’t begrudge anyone for immediately shoving the idea of paying Twitter actual money for perks like an “Undo” button and ad-free news out of their brains. To further entice people into this kind of cash-grab, Twitter has just announced the rollout of an (also premium) ability to upload NFTs as users’ profile pictures.

How will the general, non-Twitter Blue rabble out there know it’s an official NFT profile pic? Why, it’ll be within a hexagonal border instead of the traditional circular one! What a steal for just $2.99 per month...

On Twitter’s part, we mean. It’s a steal on Twitter’s part.

Connects to multiple crypto wallets — While currently limited to iOS devices, Twitter Blue’s NFT rollout will presumably come to Android and elsewhere in the coming months. For now, though, only Apple users will be able to link a supported crypto wallet to Twitter, then upload their Bored Ape / Bored Ape knockoff of choice as a new, “soft hexagonal” profile picture.

That is, until one of those wallet services experiences any kind of unforeseen outage or issue. As Jane Manchun Wong recently pointed out, a brief OpenSea AI outage caused all linked Twitter NFT collection pages to go down, as well. We hope and pray that truly horrifying situations such as that are limited to the bare minimum going forward.

How could this go wrong? — In all seriousness, the possibilities for this to cause even more NFT-induced headaches for many out there are pretty much endless. It’s really the Wild West out there right now for blockchain-based art communities — one that’s rife with scams, technical issues, and ethical qualms. Throwing such a hellhole app as Twitter into the mix will only make things worse in the end. Not that that will stop crypto-bros from being crypto-bros.