X appears to be phasing out NFT profile picture support
Quick Take
- It appears NFT owners can no longer transform their X profile picture from a circle to a hexagon.
- The company began rolling out the service about two years ago, months before Elon Muck completed his acquisition of the social media platform.
Almost exactly two years since the social media platform formerly known as Twitter began rolling out a service that would let people use an NFT as their profile picture, the option now appears to be getting phased out.
Previously, users of X could turn their circular profile picture into a hexagon by linking an NFT they owned. While it appeared on Wednesday that many users still had NFTs for profile pictures, the shape of the display has now been modified back to the standard circle.
The apparent discontinuation of the service was first reported by TechCrunch, which noted that X has removed all mentions of NFT profile pictures from its X Premium support page. After The Block initially tested X's NFT support, and found it to still be functioning on early Wednesday, the service later ceased to work.
NFTs as profile pics were status symbols
Not only did using NFTs as profile pictures provide X users with a way to express their interest in digital assets, the practice also became a kind of flexing of social and economic status as some non-fungible tokens, like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, have sold for millions of dollars. With the service, only users who could prove ownership of an NFT could transform their profile picture from a circle into a hexagon.
If the service is in fact being sunset it's unclear what the impact might be on the platform. Some of the internet's most vocal advocates of crypto and NFTs are active on X and the integration proved to be for some a legitimization of digital assets and the utility in digital ownership.
"Discontinued support for NFT profile pics on X is a step back for the industry," Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell posted on the platform. "Reduced utility is always a loss. NFT PFPs weren't widely used, but it was an MVP and never got the treatment it deserved: communities, message signing and features built around proof of ownership."
Almost immediately after X rolled out the service in early 2022 Musk criticized the integration. "Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread," he posted at the time.
Later that year, Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter and then renamed it X in July 2023.
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