The NFT market is quietly becoming infrastructure

Opinion author: Charu Sethi, President of Unique Network

Some people think that NFT is outdated, while others hope that the speculative art craze will make a comeback in the next market cycle. But both views ignore reality. NFT has neither become obsolete nor ushered in a new round of speculation. Instead, NFTs are going through perhaps the most important stage in their development: they are transforming into the core digital infrastructure that supports gaming, artificial intelligence, and machine-driven applications.

The market has changed

There are signs that the practicality of NFTs is replacing speculation, and this trend is continuing. According to DappRadar data, NFT transaction volume fell by 24% in the first quarter of 2025, but sales fell by only 10%, indicating that average price decline rather than user churn was the main reason. Artificial intelligence and social decentralized applications (DApps) - which have the potential to leverage NFTs to enable agential identities, assets, credentials and access - saw significant growth in the first quarter, while utility categories such as real world assets (RWA), domain NFTs and metaverse assets also showed continued momentum.

In gaming, platforms such as Mythical and The Sandbox continue to grow, offering in-game assets with real functional value. While there is still a vision and demand for interoperable NFTs, there are cases where developers and end users are already able to obtain such NFTs.

NFT in the era of intelligent artificial intelligence

NFTs were originally conceived to enable verifiable digital ownership, identity and programmable permissions, not speculative transactions. Its purpose is to give people ownership of their digital lives. Whether it’s identity, health records, social media content or creative works, NFTs provide a way to prove ownership. This vision is a cornerstone of the broader Web3 movement.

This basic vision was once overshadowed by the rise of meme coins and short-term financial hype, distorting the public's understanding of NFT and Web3. With the advent of the era of intelligent artificial intelligence, code and cognition are combined, and this core practicality has resurfaced. Today, autonomous AI agents need to have autonomous identities, memories, and access controls to operate efficiently on-chain.

As the artificial intelligence framework matures, NFT is gradually becoming embedded infrastructure. They serve as identity anchors, verifiable data containers, and access credentials for agents running in decentralized environments. Agents bound to the NFT can independently access services, sign transactions and trigger contract logic - their permissions are verified by the NFT. This turns NFT into a component that can run continuously across scenarios.

This utility is now in production. ReinforcedAI’s subnet on Bittensor issues NFTs as proof of Solidity audit completion, enabling cryptographic validator review and a decentralized reward mechanism. Similarly, NFTs are used to authenticate input and output processes in artificial intelligence pipelines. Meanwhile, projects like Peaq use “machine NFTs” to give devices like vehicles and drones identity and autonomous transaction capabilities. As AI agents are further integrated into Web3 systems, NFTs will become the basis for a variety of workflows, from personal AI wallets to non-fungible autonomous agents.

UX-driven wallets and mainstream entry

The rise of social wallets is another driver. Instead of complex key management, users can sign up by simply logging in via email or social account, and their avatar, membership, and credentials (displayed silently as NFTs) are displayed as part of their Web3 identity. More than 50% of users aged 18-34 already use social wallets regularly, especially in games and community applications.

These wallets prioritize user experience and can easily embed NFTs into an interface that is familiar to users. For example, in a social gaming platform, players may not even realize that their avatars, expressions, or achievements are NFTs. However, these assets are portable, tradable and interoperable, able to cross platforms and become a link between different platforms. We learned from this experience that true ownership and a superior user experience are critical to the success of SocialFi applications.

NFT as invisible infrastructure

NFTs are not going away—they are becoming core infrastructure, serving as the underlying foundation for asset ownership, transaction logic, and autonomous agent behavior in decentralized systems. They support player-owned economies in games, provide identity and credential containers for AI agents, and enable payments and access in machine-to-machine networks. This reflects a broader architectural shift away from front-end collections and toward back-end components embedded in wallets, SDKs, and protocols. NFTs now provide support for access control, data provenance, and interoperability, redefining their role from visible assets to essential system primitives.

It would be a mistake to use the return of the speculative NFT craze as a measure of success - real progress is happening at the infrastructure level, and NFTs are quietly becoming critical.