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Latest Twitter fad of hexagon NFT profile pictures? Made in Miami by this company

The latest Twitter fad, a profile picture turned into hexagon-shaped art, had its start in Miami.

Many of these digital images are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs — unique pieces of artwork, photography or other creative designs that have been purchased as investments or status symbols. The most well-known of those NFTs, images of slack-jawed primates known as Bored Apes, have sold for millions of dollars.

High-profile hexagon-ers include Alexis Ohanian, ESPN basketball analyst Ros Gold-Onwude and Gwyneth Paltrow, who unveiled her hexagon Thursday.

Twitter announced last week that users of its new premium Blue service could verify a user’s NFT ownership by transforming their profile picture from a circle into a hexagon.

The software to do that was created by Miami firm QuickNode, a blockchain technology services company.

As Miami becomes a hotbed for Web3 activity — blockchain, NFTs, and anything else related to crypto — QuickNode is fast emerging as a leader in that space. Founded in Miami in 2017, the company has raised at least $40 million from investors including SoftBank, Tiger Global and Reddit founder and South Florida resident Ohanian.

The Twitter-QuickNode collaboration began late last fall through old-style networking.

“We heard that Twitter was going to be doing this particular feature, and one of our investors happened to be very plugged into the Twitter network,” said QuickNode co-founder and chief information officer Auston Bunsen. “I asked him, ‘Can you get me in the door? All I need is for you to get me in the door.’”

That investor, Miami-based Marell Evans, a former SoftBank vice president with an extensive background in technology, said QuickNode is best-in-class when it comes to creating blockchain infrastructure.

“They are a really smart team that is starting to really build more use cases” for crypto technology, Evans said. “It was up to QuickNode to execute, and they did just that.”

Representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bunsen said Twitter asked QuickNode to build a bridge to NFT marketplaces like OpenSea to create a continuous verification process, so that every profile picture a user claimed to possess did in fact belong to them. Bunsen said members of the QuickNode team created an application-program interface just for Twitter in order to accomplish that.

“They’re verifying with us all day long,” Bunsen said.

“We want to help showcase the property you own,” Bunsen said. “You have detractors saying it’s just a status symbol, and sure maybe it is. But a lot of things start out as unserious.”

Other QuickNode clients include PayPal and Coinbase. Bunsen said that despite the recent decline in cryptocurrency prices, QuickNode continues to see demand.

“We’re not seeing any dip in billing or usage, we’re just seeing more builders, more companies, more integrations,” Bunsen said. “We sat on this Twitter thing for three months — and we’ve got several more of those types of things happening.”