Reid Hoffman: NFTs are primed for a comeback as AI agents demand a new internet identity layer!

Speaking at Consensus Miami, Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argued that NFTs are due for a "rebirth" — not as speculative collectibles, but as the foundation of a trust and identity layer for a web increasingly populated by autonomous AI agents. Hoffman said he recently purchased a CryptoPunk as a direct expression of that thesis, and that the purchase came after he began thinking through what agent-to-agent commerce actually requires at scale.

"When you begin to think we're going to have more agents than people, what does the identity layer look like?" Hoffman told the audience. "And that got me back into thinking about NFTs." He framed crypto broadly as the natural answer to the deepfake-era trust problem, pointing to his own AI clone — Reid AI — as a live example of why provenance will matter more as generative media improves.

Hoffman also flagged DAOs and…