NFTs are heading for a “rebirth” as AI agents force the Internet to solve new identity and trust issues, Reid Hoffman told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said agents trading with other agents will require trusted digital identity systems similar to what NFTs originally sought to solve. Hoffman said he began revisiting NFTs as he contemplated a future where AI agents outnumber humans online. Hoffman said. “And that got me back to thinking about NFTs.”
Hoffman said identity systems will exist in enterprises, but the more difficult problem will be identity for agents operating across the open Internet.
“It’s going to be kind of freewheeling on the internet, and how does that work? And crypto is the obvious answer,” he said.
This argument carries a through line from Hoffman’s earlier work at LinkedIn, where real-world professional identity was central to the network’s design. Hoffman said actual identity can create “more accountability, more reliability,” while also acknowledging that pseudonyms have legitimate uses in some contexts.
Hoffman, who said he bought his first Bitcoin over a decade ago and has never sold any, framed crypto as 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 matter more as generative media improves.
“When I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014, it was like this is actually part of a design feature, that this is how DNS is supposed to work. This is how identity is supposed to work, generally when you get to the Internet,” he said.
That identity problem, Hoffman explained, extends beyond agent-to-agent trading. He pointed to AI-generated content, bot farms, rigged polls and paid political influence campaigns as examples of why proof-of-humanity is becoming harder to ignore online.
In a politically calibrated stretch, Hoffman urged the crypto industry not to commit to Republicans on policy.
“If the industry goes, oh, we’re overreacting against Gensler, et cetera, and then being kind of the anti-Democratic party on this, the problem is that the pendulum swings,” he said. “It’s good to be bipartisan from the point of view that what we care about is the ecosystem. We care about how it plays a good role in society.”
Hoffman also challenged the prevailing narrative that AI is driving Big Tech layoffs.
“What I’ve seen so far in every company that says, ‘I’m making layoffs because of artificial intelligence,’ maybe other than Meta, is not out of productivity, but out of switching,” he said. “We have overstaffed because of the pandemic. We have to change. We will 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 during previous market cycles, but could bounce back as AI changes the internet. NFTs are one such area, he said, while “DAOs and other areas” could also see renewed relevance.
Asked at the end what his starting Bitcoin price was, Hoffman did not mention a number. “Is there such a thing as a starting price?” he asked.
