Reid Hoffman told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday that NFTs are about to be “reborn” as artificial intelligence agents force the Internet to solve new identity and trust issues.
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said agents transacting with other agents will require trustworthy digital identity systems, similar to the problem NFTs were originally trying to solve. Hoffman said he began to take a second look at NFTs as he considered a future in which artificial intelligence agents would outnumber humans online. “What does the identity layer look like when you start to think that we’re going to have more agents than humans? Hey, when your agent talks to my agent, we’re here to book this talk, what’s the concept of a trustworthy transaction?” said Hoffman. “It made me start thinking about NFTs again.”
Hoffman said the identity system will exist within the company, but the more difficult issue will be the identity of agents operating on the open internet.
“It’s going to be a free range on the internet, how does it work? Cryptocurrency is the obvious answer,” he said.
This argument permeated Hoffman’s early work at LinkedIn, where real-world professional identities were central to the network’s design. Huffman said a real identity creates “more accountability, more reliability,” while acknowledging that pseudonyms have legitimate uses in some situations.
Hoffman, who said he bought his first Bitcoin more than a decade ago and has never sold any, sees cryptocurrencies as a natural answer to trust issues in the era of deep fakes. He cited his own artificial intelligence clone, Reid AI, which he sent to speak at conferences, as an example of why provenance becomes more important as generated media improves.
“When I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014, it was, in fact, part of the design feature that this is how DNS is supposed to work. This is how identity is supposed to work, generally when you go online,” he said.
Hoffman explained that identity issues go beyond commerce between agents. He points to AI-generated content, bot farms, manipulated polls and paid political influence campaigns as examples of why proof of humanity is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore online.
Politically, Huffman urged the crypto industry not to overcommit to Republicans on policy.
“If the industry, oh, we overreact to people like Gensler and then get a little anti-Democratic on that, the problem is the pendulum swings,” he said. “Bipartisanship is a good thing from the perspective that we care about the ecosystem. We care about how it plays a good role in society.”
Huffman also questioned the popular narrative that artificial intelligence is driving layoffs at big tech companies.
“Every company I’ve seen so far has said, ‘I’m laying off people because of AI,’ except maybe Meta, and it’s not out of productivity, it’s just out of realignment,” he said. “We’ve overhired because of the pandemic. We need to change. We’re going to call it artificial intelligence to gain a dominant position.”
As an investor, Hoffman said he is looking for cryptocurrency ideas that may have been tried too early in previous market cycles but may come back as artificial intelligence changes the internet. NFTs are one such area, he said, while “DAOs and other areas” may also see new relevance.
When asked at the close what his Bitcoin exit price would be, Hoffman did not reveal a specific number. “Is there such a thing as an exit price?” he asked.