The richest man in the world and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk has expressed his displeasure over Twitter’s integration of non-fungible tokens (NFT). In a tweet on Friday, Musk criticized the microblogging platform for not combating cryptocurrency fraudsters who spam tweet comments, oftentimes offering fake giveaways.
The SpaceX founder described Twitter’s NFT integration as “annoying” and irritating, saying that, “Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs (sic. Nonsense) while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every tread!?”
Unfortunately, Musk’s tweet was followed by some bots he had called out Twitter to deal with. The spam bots tweeted fake giveaways in the billionaire’s tweet thread. Some are of the belief that the Tesla CEO’S criticism of Twitter’s NFT is possibly due to fraudulent accounts which often parody those of celebrities on Twitter, scamming victims through fake offers. Another genuine reason to worry, some say, is the risk account hackers pose also to token owners.
In September last year, Twitter had announced that it would include a way for users to use NFTs as their profile pictures. However, this feature will only be available to those who use the platform’s premium subscription service – Twitter Blue on Apple’s iOS devices.
Defining NFTs, the company states that they are digital items that you own. “Proof of ownership is stored on a blockchain, a digital database that is publicly accessible.” Twitter further explains that each NFT profile picture is displayed in a special hexagonal shape. This is unlike the standard display pictures on the platform, which are shown in a circular shape. Twitter users can also tap on the hexagonal NFT profile picture to see more information about the digital pieces of art. The images, it adds, are now part of a verified collection on NFT marketplace OpenSea.
According to Twitter’s product lead for the effort, Esther Crawford explained that the company is positioning itself as the social network for the discovery, conversation and education around the tokens, blockchain and crypto technology.
Crawford said, “Crypto is a key pillar of Twitter’s future. We want to support this growing interest among creators to use decentralized apps to manage virtual goods and currencies. This is just still very early days for us, but we wanted to build something that was a utility for this community that they could start interacting with right now.”
