NFTs are so dead, even Elon Musk has dropped them: NFT avatars on Twitter are gone

HONG KONG, CHINA - OCTOBER 22: Visitors take a photo of the NFT (non-fungible token) artwork known as 'Bored Ape Yacht Club' at the Digital Art Fair Xperience 2022 in Hong Kong, China on October 22, 2022. Local and international exhibitors showcase digital works using interactive Web 3.0 technologies including blockchain, virtual reality, metaverse and NFT (non-fungible token). (Photo by Miguel Candela/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images).

Two years after Twitter introduced hexagonal NFT avatars, they're gone: As reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by numerous users, the social media platform has quietly dropped the feature, and reverted all existing NFT avatars to standard ones.

NFT avatars on Twitter (now officially known as X, but we're not calling it that) debuted in January 2022 as an option for Twitter Blue subscribers, who were given the option of linking their Twitter accounts to their crypto wallets. To distinguish NFT avatars from the functionally identical JPGs the rest of us use, they were also given hexagonal frames. Twitter was one of the only mainstream platforms to adopt NFTs, and its move to integrate them was a moment of validation for those on the internet who were chasing this trend.