A look at Valuables, a service from crypto company Cent that lets users sell their tweets as non-fungible tokens in exchange for Ethereum
Scott Chipolina / Decrypt :
Context & Ripple Effects
In February 2021, Cent's Valuables was a niche experiment: mint any tweet as an NFT and auction it for Ethereum. Weeks later, Jack Dorsey listed his very first tweet on the platform, and after his promotion bids climbed to $2.5M before the NFT sold for $2,915,835.47, with proceeds donated to GiveDirectly's Africa fund.
That single auction turned Valuables into the reference point for monetizing social posts as on-chain assets, and put pressure on Twitter itself to decide whether it would treat its content as someone else's collectible market.
First-order effects
- Tweet authors gain a direct resale market for their own posts, priced in Ethereum rather than ad revenue — with Dorsey's auction setting the visible price ceiling.
- Cent captures the transaction flow of every mint and sale routed through Valuables, making a small crypto company the intermediary for Twitter's most famous content.
Second-order effects
- Twitter is forced off the sidelines: by late 2022 it tests a blockchain-agnostic tool for displaying NFTs in tweets with Dapper Labs, Magic Eden, Rarible, and Jump.trade — an acknowledgment that its users' posts have become assets on other rails.
- Ethereum gains a new class of consumer transaction demand from NFT mints and auctions, feeding the network-activity metrics that Buterin and others tie to its long-term revenue case.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platforms shift from hosting content to integrating provenance and ownership layers for it — either building native NFT support or ceding that value to third-party marketplaces like Cent's.
- Whether single-tweet collectibles sustain value beyond celebrity one-offs remains genuinely unresolved, but the auction established that identity-linked digital artifacts can clear seven-figure prices.
The trend: Social media content is being financialized into on-chain collectibles, pulling platforms like Twitter from bystanders into active NFT infrastructure partners.