I was reading this morning about how Meta is working on features that will allow users to display their NFTs on their social media profiles, and to possibly even buy and sell them from within Facebook and/or Instagram. I thought this was kind of newsworthy and so, after the reading the article, I opened up Twitter to share the story. This is then what popped up:

It is an invitation to use an NFT as my profile picture. Now, I am already doing this (it’s a CryptoBabyPunk), except that it would take someone a bit of work to determine if I truly owned the NFT or if I was just posing as a proud CryptoBabyPunk owner for the purposes of trying to increase my internet stature.

So what this new feature is intended to be is a way to easily demonstrate proof of ownership. Once you connect your crypto wallet and select your NFT, your profile picture changes to a “special hexagonal shape.” This is the marker. Though you have to be a paying Twitter customer to do it (currently a few dollars a month).

Some or many of you may be wondering why this is even worth talking about. Maybe you like your circular Twitter profile picture just the way it is. But these moves and announcements by large companies are both a vote of confidence for the crypto space and greater “utility” for NFTs.

The value that somebody might derive from an NFT is wide ranging. In some cases it might just be something to look at (which is generally how art works). And in some cases the NFT might grant access to exclusive events or provide other perks, some real and some alleged. It’s all very much evolving as we speak. But in every case, you really need to be able to differentiate real from fake. What Twitter just did is a step in that direction.

Broadly speaking, the more infrastructure that gets built out around NFTs, the more value they will have. I think bringing NFT collections to our social media profiles is, for example, a perfectly obvious extension. Here are my photos. Here are my videos. Here’s the stuff I’m tagged in. And here’s my beautiful and wonderful NFT art collection.

You can bet that the NFTs will become just as curated and carefully managed as the rest of the profile.