Elon Musk’s X discontinues NFT profile photo feature

Tech magnate Elon Musk once called adding NFTs to X “annoying” and a waste of engineering resources.

Social media platform X has removed features and information related to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as part of owner Elon Musk’s 2024 vision for the private firm. Due to the change, premium subscribers can no longer upload NFTs as their profile photos. 

The company’s support page has also been scrubbed of all content about NFT profile photos. X onboarded NFTs for account avatars in January 2022, when the platform was still called Twitter and managed by a board. 

At the time, Twitter Blue subscribers could use NFTs as their profile photos, which appeared hexagonal. Users could upload digital collectibles minted under the ERC-721 or ERC-1155 token standards, the defacto options for creating NFTs on Ethereum’s blockchain.

The feature also provided additional information when clicked upon, including the NFT’s contract address and the collection it belonged to. Elon Musk, who would later buy the company for $44 billion in October, criticized the move.

Musk said the company was better off addressing its escalating bot issue than adding NFT photos. Notably, bots remain an issuer on X under Musk’s leadership.

Following the decision to axe NFTs on X, users with hexagonal photos still featured blockchain collectibles. It is unclear if the platform will completely disable these profile photos. 

However, the announcement has likely cooled off hopes of NFT trading on X timelines, an update previously teased by developers after Musk’s takeover.

X is not the only social media company easing out of NFTs. Facebook and Instagram, under their parent company, Meta, announced similar integrations in the same year, although the company shuttered support for NFTs in March 2023.