No, it’s not April Fool’s Day. But Twitter’s entire account has been taken over by NFTs. As its new header reads: “I’ve stopped moisturizing because tweeting about NFTs is keeping me young now.”
If that’s true, the Twitter bird is going to look like a little baby duckling by the end of the day. This morning, Twitter posted, “140 free NFTs for 140 of you, besties,” nodding to Twitter’s initial 140 character limit.
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1410227743636217856
In retrospect, we should’ve expected this after Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT earlier this year through a website called Valuables by Cent, which is unaffiliated with Twitter, yet gives people the option to mint and sell NFTs of tweets. Even Mark Cuban, who has been investing in the NFT space, sold a tweet on Valuables for 0.56 ETH, or $953 at the time. Dorsey’s NFT sold for 1630 ETH, which was worth about $2.9 million at the time of sale. He donated the proceeds to GiveDirectly to aid the COVID-19 response in Africa, but NFTs are still often criticized for their negative environmental impact — others worry that the NFT market could just be a flash in the pan. But with major platforms like Twitter making NFTs, the fad might not be over just yet — or, Twitter could be testing the waters to gauge how its userbase reacts to an impromptu, free NFT drop before expanding its offerings in the space.
The catch with today’s Twitter NFT drop is that nobody can buy them — Twitter users can reply to the tweet for the chance to get one of 7 NFTs, which were minted on Rarible, an NFT marketplace, in editions of 20, which makes 140 NFTs total.
According to Twitter, there have been over 29 million tweets on the platform about NFTs. What’s next for NFTs on Twitter? We’re not sure. But with Twitter’s rapid development of new features like Spaces, Super Follows, Twitter Blue, and more, it’s possible that this won’t be the last we hear about Twitter’s foray into crypto-powered collectibles.
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