Twitter has debuted an official verification protocol for non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures, the company announced Thursday (Jan. 20).
The feature is currently only available to Twitter Blue users on iOS, who can now link their ethereum wallets with their Twitter accounts to see a list of the NFTs they own. Users can then choose one of those images and select it for a profile picture, which will come with a new hexagonal border.
While other users can still right-click or otherwise save the image, only the NFT owner will have access to a new hexagonal border that identifies the owner.
According to a Thursday CoinDesk report, users committed to stealing the image can likely still re-upload the same image to an NFT platform, make a visually identical NFT and use that as their profile picture instead — thus attaining the desired hexagon. Twitter hasn’t said whether it plans to do something about that aspect.
As NFTs have become more mainstream, these kinds of concerns have become more ubiquitous.
Twitter gets users’ NFTs with application programming interfaces (APIs) from OpenSea, an NFT marketplace. As such, it has essentially added a third party to its verification process, rather than just interacting straight with the blockchain — and if OpenSea experiences difficulty, Twitter might not be able to load the images.
The CoinDesk report says Twitter’s new NFT verification process will help endear the platform to crypto enthusiasts. It also serves as an “explicit rejection” of old CEO Jack Dorsey’s “Bitcoin-only philosophy.”
Dorsey has been a critic of what has been called Web3, which runs on blockchains as opposed to cloud computing and private servers, but he’s been a big fan of bitcoin.
PYMNTS recently reported that OpenSea purchased Dharma Labs, a digital wallet service, furthering its investments in the Web3 ecosystem.
See also: NFT Marketplace OpenSea Acquires Dharma Labs
OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer said the teams “share a vision that NFTs will be the cultural focal point of crypto’s adoption for years to come — and that vision can only be realized if using NFTs becomes easy and delightful for the average person.”
OpenSea has billed itself as the biggest NFT marketplace. Nadav Hollander, CEO of Dharma Labs, will be the new chief technology officer of OpenSea.
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