Meta and Twitter's NFT Landgrab Could Backfire

On January 20, Twitter rolled out the ability for users of its paid premium service, Twitter Blue, to change their profile picture to a non-fungible token (NFT) they own—a key part of Web3.On the same day, The Financial Times reported that Meta was working on integrating NFT ownership into their profiles on Facebook and Instagram. Both Twitter and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment for this story.“Despite the positivity around NFT use cases, there’s a lot of distrust in the community—perhaps due to the anonymity of key artists and influencers, and almost certainly due to the scammers that circle like vultures and frequent rug pulls,” says PJ Cooper, founder of Pandimensional Trading Co., which is launching its own NFT collection later this year. Despite those reservations, Cooper is largely supportive of Twitter’s entry into the NFT space, and says he will display an NFT as his profile picture when functionality rolls out to the UK.Cooper does, however, have worries about the fact that people can still right-click and save NFT profile pictures and mint their own version of them as NFTs.A company spokesperson for NFT marketplace OpenSea, Allie Mack, confirmed that NFT profile pictures that appear on Twitter are verified through the company’s site. Plenty of Twitter users have NFT art as their profile picture, but find it difficult to prove ownership, particularly when faced by trolls who like nothing more than to right-click and steal their NFTs to show them the fallibility of their investments. Twitter’s plans to prove ownership officially are “a nice way to demonstrate digital property rights.”It’s easy to see why Twitter and Meta want to get involved in the NFT space—Woodward says it’s a land grab that, in the case of Meta, gives it ownership of one of the key technologies that could be involved in constructing its own version of the metaverse.