What Is a PFP NFT?

What Are PFPs?

As non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have transitioned from niche digital collectibles to highly sought-after mainstream digital assets, a new trend has emerged: NFT profile pictures. Often referred to simply as ‘PFPs’ — an abbreviation that references social media profile pictures — NFTs from a wide variety of collections are the avatar of choice in many corners of Twitter, Discord, and GitHub.

Social media users choose NFT profile pictures (PFPs) for a variety of reasons, most often to signal their affiliation with a particular NFT community, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). Others display their NFTs in their profiles as a gallery to showcase an expensive collectible. Whatever the reason, one thing seems certain — with celebrities such as Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg adopting NFT profile pictures, and companies such as Visa spending hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars acquiring them, the trend has reached mainstream adoption.

PFP NFT Projects

The term PFP can refer to both a type of NFT collection that is designed to be used as a profile picture, or simply a profile picture that uses an image from an NFT collection. The collections typically contain NFTs that iterate on a common theme or character. Most NFTs are minted on the Ethereum blockchain, though NFTs are increasingly being created on other chains such as Solana and Flow.

The origin of the crypto PFP trend is most often associated with the meteoric rise of CryptoPunks, an NFT project created in 2017 that features 10,000 uniquely generated characters. The project’s popularity greatly increased in 2021, and CryptoPunks holders began to use their NFTs as their Twitter avatars.

As the trend took hold, other NFT PFP projects soon developed. Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 unique ape-themed collectibles that provide their owners with access to members-only benefits, emerged in 2021. Its NFTs have sold for millions of dollars. Other popular PFP NFT collections include World of Women, a 10,000-item collection of unique portraits of women; Meebits, a collection launched by CryptoPunks creator Larva Labs; and Hashmasks, a collection of masked characters, among many others. Additionally, in 2022, the popularity of the NFT PFP trend led Twitter to introduce a new mechanism to verify that users own the NFTs displayed in their profiles.

The Future of NFT Profile Pictures

With many NFTs fetching prices in the millions at auction, the PFP trend invites everyday individuals from all types of backgrounds to showcase their NFTs as they participate in public forums. This in turn has further increased interest in collections like BAYC, Hashmasks, Meebits, and World of Women, but the dynamic foundry of NFT PFP projects means that there’s always a new trend around the corner. Ultimately, NFTs and PFP NFTs in particular provide a novel way to trade NFTs while simultaneously participating in the public forum of media and art culture.