Why the Co-Founder of LinkedIn Is Betting on NFTs Again

**Reid Hoffman** (0:00)
When I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014, and by the way, I haven't sold any since then, I'm a believer in all crypto, it was like, actually in fact, this is part of a design feature that this is how DNS should work. This is how identity should be working, generally when you get to the internet.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
Reid, welcome to Consensus.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:24)
Thank you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Have you spoken at a crypto conference before?

**Reid Hoffman** (0:27)
I don't think so, and if it was, it was in the prehistoric stone age, 2015, et cetera.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:33)
All right, let's give a Consensus welcome to Reid Hoffman, please.
Reid, you and I spoke, I think it was about six months ago, and it was a fascinating conversation, and you said something to me then that I wanna see if that thesis still stands, which you said you were focused more on the app layer than anything else. And then since then, I think you bought a CryptoPunk, you did a number of podcasts I saw on Stablecoins, I think one of your wallets was Docs. There's a lot of things that happened since then. Are you still focused on the app layer? Are you thinking about info or institutions? Where are you today?

**Reid Hoffman** (1:11)
So there's probably an addition. I'm still focused on app layer. I do think that there's a number of areas that have been experimented with in the last 10 years that now as we've gotten this new level of stability, it's almost like Internet One and Internet Two. Like Webvan went out of business, but actually now we have Instacart and all the rest. So I think there's a lot of things that will be coming back and that's part of the app layer focused on when we were talking about. But the other thing, and that's part of buying a CryptoPunk, is I started thinking a lot, I've been spending a huge amount of time on AI.
Kind of co-founded a couple of AI companies, including one trying to cure cancer. And I've been thinking about what AI and agents mean for everything. And one of the things I went, oh, wait a minute, this is going to be another important thing within Crypto. And not like, for example, agenda commerce, yes. You know, kind of payments roles, yes, et cetera. You know, kind of the enablement of payments with an agent, yes.
But actually, in fact, what happens is when you begin to think we're going to have more agents than people, what is the identity layer look like? What is the kind of the notion of, hey, when your agent is talking to my agent and we book this talk here, you know, what actually, in fact, like, you know, is it a trustable transaction? Do you have identity, et cetera? And that got me back into thinking about NFTs. And that's part of why I ended up in CryptoPunk.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:29)
You're starting to think about NFTs. Who else here is thinking about NFTs right now?
All right. NFTs are coming back, baby.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:36)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:36)
So you buy CryptoPunk because you were thinking about the network-effective community. What were the areas you were interested in?

**Reid Hoffman** (2:42)
Well, so precisely one of the things that I think is interesting is if you say that the entire world of work changes because of agents, and the fact that you might have agents that are not just your talent agent, but also and scheduling agent, but also doing various kind of predictive work. But we still have this kind of super agency of humans doing that. Well, what is that a whole identity ecosystem look like? And that identity ecosystem, while there will be important identity ecosystems within the companies, like it's going to be kind of free range on the internet. And how does that work? And crypto is the obvious answer. Now, is it Ethereum, Solana, etc.? Who knows? And maybe all in terms of all this stuff. But that started getting me thinking about it. Then, of course, part of the thing that was very clever about CryptoPunks and FDs was like profile pictures, online identity.
And then I met the CryptoPunks founders. They're great.
And I was like, okay, I should buy CryptoPunk. I should start getting... Because I always think you should get your hands into it when you're trying to learn.
And so it's like one of the ways to try to learn.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:55)
I think about your career and we go back to Paypal, money on the internet. We think about LinkedIn, identity on the internet. But now we're really in this interesting world of trust and truth.