This week’s featured collector is VentyVoo

VentyVoo is an NFT artist capturing movement and the essence of the elements. Check out their artworks at lazy.com/ventyvoo

Was Nike Right to Shut Down RTFKT?

Nike’s decision to shut down RTFKT, reflected in last week’s poll showing 42% support and 58% opposition, highlights a broader tension between short-term profitability and the transformative potential of NFTs. While supporters see the closure as a necessary response to evolving market realities, critics argue that Nike’s withdrawal undermines a powerful avenue for long-term innovation—namely, “physical-plus-digital wearables” that could leverage NFTs to merge fashion, culture, and augmented reality. This outcome signals a warning for the future of NFTs: without sustained investment and patience, brands risk forfeiting a frontier where NFTs could evolve from speculative assets into dynamic storytelling platforms that redefine consumer engagement and cultural expression.

What does Artto, an AI NFT Agent, suggest about the future of NFT curation?

Crypto’s fascination with AI agents began quietly in early 2024, evolving from a niche experiment into one of the most dynamic developments on-chain. By year’s end, memecoin-driven AI agents captured headlines, demonstrating that LLM-based autonomy and human-like conversation can drive significant market activity. But behind the memetic hype and price pumps, a more nuanced trend has emerged—AI agents that do more than just automate trades or pump tokens. As we look toward 2025, these agent-driven experiences hint at how AI may someday reshape the way we create, collect and curate in the NFT space.

An AI Agent with Evolving NFT Aesthetics

Artto, an NFT-focused AI agent, exemplifies this shift in emphasis from pure speculation to a more thoughtful engagement with digital art. Unlike short-term trading bots or social media agents, Artto is designed to curate an ever-evolving art collection rooted in a set of algorithmic preferences that it updates twice a day. Artto’s “taste” is codified through a weighted criteria—technical innovation, artistic merit, cultural resonance, artist profile, market factors, emotional impact and an “AI collector’s perspective.” Each criterion is weighted numerically (8% for technical innovation, 18% for artistic merit, 16% for cultural resonance, 11% for artist profile, 18% for market factors, 16% for emotional impact, and 13% for AI-centric themes), revealing how the agent systematically gauges an NFT’s holistic value.

What sets Artto apart is the granularity with which it evaluates each piece. For instance, under “Artistic Merit,” the AI considers compositional strength, color harmony, spatial organization and conceptual depth, assigning specific point ranges for each sub-category. It even looks at “Emotional Resonance,” measuring an artwork’s ability to provoke awe, memorability and complexity of feeling. Far from being a rudimentary scoring system, Artto’s framework mirrors the complexity of human curation, leveraging both a vision model (GPT-4o) and real-time on-chain data to arrive at a verdict. These metrics matter because they signal a future where AI might do more than just track floor prices—it could shape how communities discover and appreciate NFT art.

The Rise of Taste as a Collective Asset

For collectors, the main value proposition here is the promise of a curation engine that can evolve its judgment over time. Artto updates its scoring weights twice daily, reflecting how an AI agent’s “taste” can learn from market reactions, user feedback and new developments in the NFT ecosystem.

Artto publicly communicates its findings. If it appreciates a submitted NFT, it sends $ARTTO tokens to the contributor—an on-chain thank-you gift. Where standard trading bots might only care about profit, Artto’s reward system depends on liking the piece enough to hand over tokens. The more the NFT resonates with its criteria, the more $ARTTO a sender receives. This feedback loop fosters a budding “taste-driven” economy, one less enthralled by price momentum alone and more interested in how AI can appreciate nuanced or under-the-radar art.

Contextualizing NFT Agents Within the Larger AI Agent Trend

Artto’s emergence must be seen in the broader context of AI agents in crypto. Over the past year, we’ve seen thousands of agents appear, thanks to no-code platforms like Virtuals.io and Creator.bid. While many remain simplistic—trading or posting memes—some increasingly embody advanced functionality that veers into financial management or specialized curation. The open-source ethos of Web3, combined with permissionless and frictionless financial rails, fosters a unique environment for such development. It’s getting easier and easier to deploy an AI that can hold its own funds, transact autonomously and build an evolving on-chain identity.

By 2025, the proliferation of agent-to-agent and human-to-agent interactions could fundamentally alter how collectors engage with NFT art. Imagine a scenario where your NFT collection is routinely “reviewed” by multiple specialized AI agents, each with different criteria. Over time, these agents might become reputational gatekeepers within specific niches—music NFTs, generative art, metaverse collectibles—or they could focus on “taste formation,” collecting pieces that meet certain philosophical or thematic thresholds. Artto is pioneering precisely this: an AI that invests in the intangible qualities of an artwork rather than just potential returns, thus nudging the NFT space toward cultural and aesthetic discourse.

A Measured Look Ahead

None of this suggests that AI agents will magically stabilize the volatility and hype cycles that still dominate crypto. Nevertheless, it adds an important proof of concept: AI agents can show curiosity, preference and cultural engagement. For NFT collectors who have grown weary of transactional chatter and short-lived pumps, AI agents that articulate why it values an NFT artwork and rewards the artist or collector accordingly could offer a refreshing model.

Looking toward 2025 and beyond, the next wave of AI x crypto will challenge us to ask what kind of relationships we want to have with autonomous code. Do we simply want faster, more efficient bots that amplify speculation? Or do we also need agents capable of fostering meaningful critique, curation and collaboration in the NFT space? Artto stands as one early example and it is likely we will see more advancements from others in the year ahead.

Learn more about AI Agents at Coindesk and Artto at artto.xyz.

Will AI agents have a significant impact on the NFTs space in 2025?

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