The first major big tech social media company to add NFT profile picture verification was Twitter, since that time Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta has announced that Instagram will add the feature “soon” and the popular NSFW social platform OnlyFans has also announced the same.
Twitter and NFT profile picture verification
Since the popularity explosion of NFTs, NFT enthusiast twitter users have been replacing their profile pictures with their owned NFT. This has become a very common practice with celebrities and sports stars joining in on the NFT profile picture practice. With the scarcity and in some cases incredibly high price tags (sometimes over $1 million dollars for an NFT) associated with some of the NFTs there have always been skeptics who doubt some users actual ownership of the particular NFT they may flaunt as a profile picture.
Sure, you may actually own that $500,000 jpeg of a monkey, but maybe you just right clicked and saved it, how will we ever know? To combat this, Twitter released an official feature to verify ownership of the NFT profile picture. Users simply need to link up their Ethereum wallet holding the NFT to their twitter account, then choose their NFT.
The feature is limited to Ethereum (ETH) for now, but the company has plans to possibly add in other blockchains in the future. The feature will provide uses with a hexagon check box next to the NFT profile picture instead of the standard circle and is currently only available to twitter blue (subscription based twitter service) users. The hexagon verification image can be followed by twitter users to see the NFT metadata.
Social Media Platforms Instagram and OnlyFans adding NFT profile picture verification
Mark Zuckerberg, The CEO of Meta was speaking at the South By SouthWest convention (SXSW) and confirmed the rumors that NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens would be arriving on Instagram “in the near term”. Zuckerberg didn’t provide many details about how NFTs would be integrated within Instragram, but did say “I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly what that’s going to be today”. He later added “but over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.”
OnlyFans is best known as a subscription based social platform which has become a lucrative way for some influencers to monetize their content. OnlyFans has gained most of its popularity due to its polices allowing adult content creators to monetize their accounts. As its popularity has grown over the past few years with the social media platform raking in $1.2 billion in revenue in 2021 alone.
Despite the success, OnlyFans wanted to clean up its image last year to attract additional advertisers to the platform and announced it would be changing its policy to not allow any sexually explicit videos on the platform. It later decided to reverse that decision after they were able to source investments that did not deem the site to cause any “reputational harm”.
OnlyFans still does seek to become a mainstream social media platform, many celebrities have joined the platform and are able to amass huge followings including Cardi B and Floyd Mayweather Jr. Now OnlyFans plans to add NFT profile picture verification as well. Reports state that OnlyFans has been working on the feature since December, 2021 and plans to release it soon. Similar to twitter, only NFTs minted on the Ethereum blockchain will be supported upon release of the feature.