Bad news for users of cartoon monkey images, as X ends its NFT profile pictures feature, which – until this week – was included with X's premium package.

Launched in 2022 as part of its paid "Twitter Blue" service, NFT profile pictures allowed digital art enthusiasts to display their radically overpriced JPEGs while linking back to information about the art through crypto wallets.
Conceptually, that fed into the push to use NFTs as a form of exposure for artists and to facilitate digital ownership. But over the past 12 months, the NFT market has crashed back down to earth in alignment with the broader crypto blowback, amid questions of market need and ongoing regulatory concerns.

In a nutshell, crypto has increasingly been used for ill purposes, which led many crypto fans to learn the hard way why so many protections and regulatory steps have been built into the modern banking process.

Absolutely, it would be nice to have a system other than fees and controls of the banking industry. But minus them, crypto payments are open to exploitation and criminal activity, which has left many worse off.

Curiously, more regulation over crypto assets is being pushed, going against the core value proposition of the system. But any way, crypto is not as cool with tech anymore, and as such, X is dumping NFT profile pictures as an option.

There is no indication yet whether X will roll all of the existing hexagonal profile PFPs back.

That said, this is a step backward for digital art enthusiasts, though hardly surprising at this point: Meta had already curtailed efforts supporting NFT visualization and there are other platforms already moving away from their own digital art programs to date.

Not that digital assets have no value. Because people spend billions in in-game purchases in Fortnite and Minecraft, one can well argue that they are worth something. In NFT art, however, they are not.

Increasingly NFTs have proven to be a misguided vision of the future, coming too soon but other forms of digital assets will play a bigger part in the next stage.