NFTs are expected to experience a “renaissance” as AI agents force the internet to solve new problems of identity and trust, Reid Hoffman said at CoinDesk’s Miami Consensus conference on Wednesday.
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said agents transacting with other agents will need trusted digital identity systems that resemble what NFTs were originally trying to solve. Hoffman said he began revisiting NFTs as he envisioned a future in which AI agents outnumber humans online. “When you start to think that we’re going to have more agents than people, what does the identity layer look like? What’s the notion of, hey, when your agent talks to my agent and we book this conference here, is that a reliable transaction? » said Hoffman. “And it made me think again about NFTs.”
Hoffman said identity systems will exist within companies, but the most difficult problem will be the identity of agents operating on the open Internet.
“It’s going to be sort of free on the Internet, and how does that work? And cryptography is the obvious answer,” he said.
This argument draws on Hoffman’s earlier work at LinkedIn, where real-world professional identity was central to the network’s design. Hoffman said real identity can create “more accountability, more trustworthiness,” while recognizing that pseudonyms have legitimate uses in certain contexts.
Hoffman, who said he bought his first Bitcoin more than a decade ago and never sold any, presented crypto as the natural answer to the trust problem of the deepfake era. He cited his own AI clone, Reid AI, which he sent to speak at conferences, as an example of why provenance will matter more as generative media improves.
“When I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014, it felt like, actually, this was part of a design feature, that this was how DNS should work. This is how identity should work, typically when you access the Internet,” he said.
This identity problem, Hoffman explained, extends beyond agent-to-agent commerce. He cited AI-generated content, bot farms, manipulated polls and paid political influence campaigns as examples of why proof of humanity is increasingly difficult to ignore online.
In a politically calibrated move, Hoffman urged the crypto industry not to overcommit to Republicans on policy.
“If the industry says, oh, we’re overreacting against Gensler, et cetera, and then we’re sort of anti-Democratic on this, the problem is the pendulum swings,” he said. “It’s good to be bipartisan from the perspective of what we care about is the ecosystem. We care about how it plays a good role in society.”
Hoffman also challenged the dominant narrative that AI is driving layoffs at big tech companies.
“What I’ve seen so far in every company that says, ‘I’m laying people off because of AI,’ maybe other than Meta, is not about productivity, it’s just about repurposing,” he said. “We’ve overhired because of the pandemic. We need to change. We’re going to call it AI for a position of strength.”
As an investor, Hoffman said he looks for crypto ideas that may have been tried too early in previous market cycles, but could come back as AI changes the internet. NFTs are one such area, he said, while “DAOs and other areas” could also see renewed relevance.
When asked at the close what his Bitcoin exit price was, Hoffman did not give a number. “Is there an exit price? he asked.
