Amid its various new updates and features in development, Twitter is also working to latch onto the rising interest in NFTs, which has seen digital artworks take on a new life of their own, generating billions in sales as users look to buy up the most exclusive pieces, which they can essentially use as status symbols across social networks.

You’ve no doubt noticed this yourself, with many Twitter users switching their profile images to portraits of animated monkeys, cats, trolls, and a broad range of other creations.

That’s one way for users to show-off their latest digital art purchases, but Twitter’s actually looking to facilitate more direct connection – take a look at this initial mock-up of how it’s looking to help users display their NFTs.

As you can see in this video, posted by Twitter’s Head of Consumer Product Marketing Justin Taylor, the new process would enable Twitter users to connect their digital wallet, which would then provide a direct linkage between the user and their NFT purchase activity. That would then enable Twitter to provide a mark of authenticity and/or ownership on any NFTs displayed (an ‘Ethereum checkmark’ as Twitter refers to it), as you can see in the final display, with a symbol on the NFT image noting that it is, in fact, owned by the account holder.

Twitter’s also developing a new ‘Collectible’ tab, where users would be able to display their owned NFTs to profile visitors (note, too, the ‘Reactions’ tab instead of ‘Likes’, which is connected to Twitter’s ongoing Tweet Reactions experiment).

It’s an interesting experiment, which, as noted, leans into what Twitter users are doing with NFTs anyway. The focus on NFTs as avatars also ties into the development of the Metaverse concept, with these representative images also likely to be expanded into digital characters which can then be used in other virtual applications as a form of identity.

And because these are one-off works, no one else is technically able to use the exact same character model, while the exclusivity element can also boost your digital cred – kind of like a verified checkmark, but for those really in touch with digital shifts (or just rich).

Twitter’s not the only platform experimenting with NFT display options, with Instagram also developing a similar profile showcase option for your owned NFTs, while Facebook is also investing big in the broader Metaverse concept, which ties into the same themes.

In Facebook’s case, that will more likely involve the aforementioned fully-functional digital avatars based on these images, or a virtual display of NFT artworks in, say, virtual reality, but the impetus is largely the same, connecting into the latest, emerging content trends that point to the next big platform shift.

Twitter hasn’t launched a live test of this new display option as yet, and but it is already leaning into cryptocurrency for payments, and it does seem to fit with the rising trends in the app.

It could be a popular option – expect to see it in the wild sometime soon.