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Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was completed yesterday and the integration of NFTs has already been announced.
Elon Musk begins the restructuring of Twitter, NFTs are added
A real revolution began yesterday at Twitter, which saw the expulsion of CEO Parag Agrawal.
It seems that the new CEO may be the new owner, Elon Musk, who has already begun to revolutionize the company.
Indeed, Musk is intent on making numerous changes that could eventually really revolutionize what is one of the most historic social networks in existence, since it was born in 2006.
One of his first initiatives in this regard was to ask Tesla engineers to meet with Twitter’s product leaders to review the platform’s computer code.
In recent days, Musk had joked that the so-called “edit button,” or tweet text editing feature, had not yet been integrated into Twitter because it was claimed to be a difficult thing to do.
Yesterday’s ouster of four top managers, and the dispatch of Tesla’s engineers, makes it clear that Musk seems quite intent on shaking up the company to get it back to innovating promptly and quickly.
He also announced that he intends to lay off up to 75% of the staff, probably to make the company less expensive and more streamlined.
In short, a real revolution.
Elon Musk: the integration of NFTs into Twitter
Most likely, integration of crypto services will also be part of this revolution.
One of these has already been under experimentation for some time, that is, since before the Musk era began.
It is the so-called NFT Tweet Tiles, officially announced yesterday.
Now testing: NFT Tweet Tiles 🚀
Some links to NFTs on @rarible, @MagicEden, @dapperlabs and @Jumptradenft will now show you a larger picture of the NFT alongside details like the title and creator. One more step in our journey to let developers impact the Tweet experience. pic.twitter.com/AkBisciB1i
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) October 27, 2022
Through this feature it will be possible to connect Twitter to four NFT marketplaces: Rarible, Magic Eden, Dapper Labs and Jump.trade. Interestingly, the largest platform, namely OpenSea, is excluded at this stage.
This connection will allow NFTs to be shared on Twitter with larger images and details such as title and creator.
According to some, this would only be a first small step toward integrating the buying and selling of NFTs.
In fact, a first integration was launched some time ago, but it was not very successful. Moreover, Elon Musk himself had criticized it as being annoying.
The fact is that this previous integration was really about creating NFTs, while the new one is about promoting NFTs for sale.
It is worth mentioning that in order to be sustainable, Musk’s plan for Twitter involves a large increase in revenue, so some kind of integration with buying and selling NFTs could come in handy if fees are collected on transactions.
The four connected marketplaces use a variety of blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, Tezos, and Immutable X, and the feature built into Twitter is designed to also enable NFTs supported on other blockchains in the future.
For now, this feature is still only in the testing phase for selected users.
The reinstatement of banned accounts
Another initiative in this new era could be the restoration of locked accounts.
Or, rather, the introduction of the possibility of having locked accounts unlocked forever.
The reference is to those accounts, such as Donald Trump‘s, which have been permanently locked by Twitter in the past, and which Elon Musk claims he would like to somehow rehabilitate.
To be precise, he would like to lift the lifetime bans, so much so that he has already stated that he would like Donald Trump to return to tweeting. However, he has not yet revealed how he intends to handle the process, partly because in cases such as Kanye West‘s for example, account rehabilitation led to new violations that inevitably ended up producing the indefinite suspension.
The issue of free speech, however, seems to be crucial for Musk. Indeed, he has also stated that the reason he bought Twitter is to enable all of humanity to be able to engage in public discussion on a kind of global virtual plaza.
On the other hand, however, this cannot mean that trespassing should be allowed on Twitter, so there will always and still be limits.
In the case of Donald Trump, it is not yet clear whether he has violated any laws. There are ongoing investigations and court proceedings that will determine this, and in theory it would be necessary to wait until the conclusion of these trials to be able to be sure.
Instead, in Kanye West’s case, the violations are more blatant, but it seems that Musk’s idea is not to proceed with lifetime bans but perhaps with other forms of punishment or limitation.
Twitter’s shares on the stock market
In theory, Twitter’s stock should be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) today.
Indeed, Elon Musk has purchased virtually all the shares. Therefore, there should be no more outstanding.
This will lead to the inability to trade shares, causing the inevitable delisting of the stock from the exchange.
However, the new owner has stated that he intends to bring it back to the stock exchanges within 3-5 years.
The fact that he wanted to buy all the shares at $54.2 each is most likely due to the fact that he intends to run the company completely independently. This is necessary if he wants to turn it inside out in a short time, but it becomes less and less important as the revolution reaches its climax.
So once it is turned inside out and relaunched, it could profit from selling the stock at a price perhaps above $54.2.
Yesterday the stock closed at $53.7, or a gap of less than 1% from Musk’s purchase price.
In February it had fallen as low as $31, but in the past it had also reached above $80. Should the market value of Twitter shares return to the highs, it would mean a gain of about 50% over the current value.
Binance in the Twitter acquisition
Yesterday, Binance CEO Changpeng CZ Zhao let it be known that the company has sent Musk the $500 million agreed upon to participate in the Twitter acquisition.
Our intern says we wired the $500 million 2 days ago, probably just as I was being asked about Elon/Twitter. https://t.co/gM65GHUnZC
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) October 28, 2022
He also said that now that Musk has taken control, he feels much more secure regarding his Twitter account.
In addition, he called for the introduction of the edit button and the elimination of comments made by bots.
I feel much more secure about my Twitter account now that Elon has sink'ed in there.
Edit button
No API/bot comments— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) October 27, 2022
While the nature of the personal relationship between CZ and Musk is not yet clear, it is, however, possible to imagine that thanks to Binance, i.e., the world’s largest crypto exchange, Twitter could now integrate several crypto features.
The curious thing in this regard is that while yesterday the price of Dogecoin was up 20%, today it is falling 6%. It is as if yesterday the hypothesis of integration between Dogecoin and Twitter had spread through the markets, while today that hypothesis has already deflated.
The point is that although Musk is a supporter of Dogecoin, there are currently other blockchains that are more prominent and used that could provide better integration. Moreover, it is really still too early to try to figure out what kind of integrations we can talk about.
Elon Musk’s comment
After kicking off the revolution, Musk commented thus, “the bird is freed”.
the bird is freed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022
The little bird is the symbol of Twitter, so he announced that he had “freed” Twitter.
It is not clear what he freed it from, but the concept he had been expressing several times was that it was somewhat caged, but it wanted to fly again.
Indeed, it had seemed for years that Twitter was now burdened by its own inability to innovate. Musk probably plans to unleash its creative forces again by effectively giving it a new life.