The impact of NFT profile pictures within social network communities

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how NFT profile pictures on social media, especially Twitter, have become a unified social community influenced mainly by the Bored Ape Yacht Club, using blockchain and social network analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates the social integration of NFT profile picture projects and introduces a methodology combining blockchain and Twitter data with graph analysis.

Findings

NFT profile picture collections form a single social community

The Bored Ape Yacht Club influences other NFT communities

NFT social networks are driven by popular collections

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the role of social media, specifically Twitter, in the context of non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs. Such emerging technology framing the creation and exchange of digital object, started years ago with early projects such as "CryptoPunks" and since early 2021, has received an increasing interest by a community of people creating, buying, selling NFT's and by the media reporting to the general public. In this work it is shown how the landscape of one class of projects, specifically those used as social media profile pictures, has become mainstream with leading projects such as "Bored Ape Yacht Club", "Cool Cats" and "Doodles". This work illustrates how heterogeneous data was collected from the Ethereum blockchain and Twitter and then analysed using algorithms and state-of-art metrics related to graphs. The initial results show that from a social network perspective, the collections of most popular NFTs can be considered as a single community around NFTs. Thus, while each project has its own value and volume of exchange, on a social level all of them are primarily influenced by the evolution of values and trades of "Bored Ape Yacht Club" collection.