Reid Hoffman says NFTs may make a comeback as AI agents strain online identity
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said autonomous agents will need crypto-based trust systems to transact across the open internet.
What to know:
- Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock and co-founder of LinkedIn, told the audience at Consensus that the online world needs a better identity layer as the internet becomes increasingly populated by autonomous AI agents.
- Hoffman said he recently purchased a CryptoPunk because questions about online identity are at the center of his AI-and-crypto investment thesis.
- He also urged the crypto industry to remain bipartisan rather than tilt fully Republican, warning that overcommitting to one party is bad for the ecosystem long term.
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said agents transacting with other agents will require trustworthy digital identity systems that resemble what NFTs originally tried to solve. Hoffman said he began revisiting NFTs as he considered a future in which AI agents outnumber humans online.”When you begin to think we’re going to have more agents than people, what does the identity layer look like? What is the notion of, hey, when your agent’s talking to my agent, and we book this talk here, is it a trustable transaction?” Hoffman said. “And that got me back into thinking about NFTs.”
Hoffman said identity systems will exist inside companies, but the harder problem will be identity for agents operating across the open internet.
“It’s going to be kind of free range on the internet, and how does that work? And crypto is the obvious answer,” he said.
This argument carries a throughline 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 responsibility, more reliability,” while also acknowledging that pseudonyms have legitimate uses in some contexts.
