NFTs are due for a “rebirth” as AI agents force the internet to solve new identity and trust problems, Reid Hoffman told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said agents transacting with other agents need reliable digital identity systems similar to what NFTs originally tried to solve. Hoffman said he started looking at NFTs again because he was considering a future where AI agents outnumber humans online. “If you start thinking that we’re going to have more agents than people, what does the identity layer look like? What’s the idea of, hey, when your agent talks to my agent, and we book this conversation here, is that a trustworthy transaction?” Hofman said. “And that got me thinking about NFTs again.”
Hoffman said identity systems will exist within companies, but the more difficult problem will be identity for agents operating on the open Internet.
“It’s going to be a kind of free-range internet, and how does that work? And crypto is the obvious answer,” he said.
This argument stems from Hoffman’s previous work at LinkedIn, where real-world professional identity was central to the network’s design. Hoffman said actual identity can create “more accountability and more trustworthiness,” while also recognizing that pseudonyms have legitimate uses in some contexts.
Hoffman, who said he bought his first Bitcoin more than a decade ago and has never sold one, called crypto the natural answer to the trust problem of the deepfake era. He cited his own AI clone, Reid AI, which he has sent to speak at conferences, as an example of why provenance will increasingly matter as generative media improves.
“When I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014, it was like this was part of a design feature, that this is how DNS should work. This is how identity should work, generally when you get on the internet,” he said.
That identity problem, Hoffman explained, extends beyond the trade between agents. He pointed to AI-generated content, bot farms, manipulated polls and paid political influence campaigns as examples of why the evidence of humanity online is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
On a politically aligned track, Hoffman urged the crypto industry not to align itself too much with Republicans on policy.
“If the industry says, oh, we’re overreacting to Gensler and so on, and then we’re sort of anti-democratic on this issue, then the problem is that the pendulum is swinging,” he said. “It’s good to have two parties from the point of view of what we care about: the ecosystem. We think it’s important that it plays a good role in society.”
Hoffman also challenged the prevailing narrative that AI is the cause of layoffs at Big Tech.
“What I’ve seen so far with every company that says, ‘I’m going to be laid off because of AI,’ perhaps unlike Meta, is not about productivity, it’s about redeployment,” he said. “We’ve hired too many people because of the pandemic. We have to change. We’re going to call it AI for strength.”
As an investor, Hoffman said he looks for crypto ideas that may have been tried too early during previous market cycles, but could return as AI changes the internet. NFTs are one such area, he said, while “DAOs and other areas” could also see renewed relevance.
When Hoffman was asked at the end what his Bitcoin exit price was, he didn’t mention a number. “Is there such a thing as an exit price?” he asked.