Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Why Facebook and Twitter Opened the Door to NFTs

The social-media giants are taking a calculated risk by relaxing control over some of their users’ data to accommodate the craze for blockchain-based digital collectibles.

January 25, 2022 at 1:30 PM UTC

By Scott Duke Kominers

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

Portable.
Photo illustration by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

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Facebook and Instagram are reportedly working on ways to let users display non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on their profiles, and on building a marketplace to let users buy and sell these digital art objects and collectibles. No sooner did the Financial Times break that news last week than Twitter launched a first version of its own NFT integration that lets people use their NFTs as profile pictures.

This represents a big change for the social-media giants, which mostly earn their money by taking full control of the data that users post on their platforms and harvesting it to drive engagement and target advertising. Unlike the pictures, videos and text that swirl through most of the social media universe, NFTs are digital assets that live off-platform, in blockchain databases that are not controlled by any individual or organization.