Reid Hoffman said Wednesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference that NFTs are set to “make a comeback” as AI agents force the internet to solve new identity and trust problems.
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said agents who transact with other agents will need a trusted digital identity system similar to what NFTs were originally intended to solve. Hoffman said he began reconsidering NFTs in light of a future in which AI agents outnumber humans online. “When you start thinking that there will be more agents than humans, what will the identity layer look like? When your agent is talking to my agent and we book this conversation here, is that a trusted transaction?” Hoffman said. “And that made me think about NFTs again.”
Hoffman said that while identity systems will exist within enterprises, the more difficult problem is the identity of agents operating on the open Internet.
“It’s going to be some sort of free range on the internet, but how does that work? And cryptography is the obvious answer,” he said.
This discussion conveys consistency from Hoffman’s previous work at LinkedIn, where real-world professional identities were central to network design. Hoffman said a real identity can create “greater responsibility and greater credibility,” but acknowledged that pseudonyms can legitimately be used in some situations.
Hoffman, who said he first bought Bitcoin more than a decade ago and has never sold it, framed the cryptocurrency as a natural solution to the trust problem in the age of deepfakes. He cited his AI clone, Reed AI, which he sent to speak at a conference, as an example of why provenance becomes more important as generated media improves.
“When I first bought Bitcoin in 2014, I thought, actually, this is part of the design feature, this is what DNS should be, this is what identity should look like when you access the internet in general,” he said.
As Hoffman explains, that identity issue extends beyond business transactions between agencies. He cited AI-generated content, bot farms, manipulated polls and paid political influence campaigns as examples of why proof of humanity is becoming harder to ignore online.
To the extent politically aligned, Hoffman urged the crypto industry not to commit too much to Republicans on policy.
“If the industry were to say, oh, we’re overreacting to Mr. Gensler and others and becoming anti-Democratic, so to speak, on this, the problem is that the pendulum swings,” he said. “It’s good to be bipartisan because what we care about is the ecosystem. We care about how it plays a good role in society.”
Hoffman also challenged the popular theory that AI is driving layoffs at big tech companies.
“All the companies I’ve seen that say, ‘We’re cutting people because of AI,’ except maybe Meta, aren’t being less productive, they’re just not being able to shift shifts,” he said. “We have overemployed because of the pandemic. We need to change. We call it AI and we are trying to build a strong position.”
As an investor, Hoffman said he is looking 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, but “DAOs and other areas” could also see new relevance, he said.
Asked what Bitcoin’s exit price would be at the end of the day, Hoffman did not give a number. “Is there such a thing as an exit price?” he asked.
