Most people are still waiting for the next JPEG bull market, but I increasingly feel that the real NFT cycle has already begun; it just no longer looks like NFTs.

My clearest judgment now is that the main battlefield for the next NFT wave won't be avatars, but identity.
Past NFTs were more like speculative assets; in the future, NFTs will increasingly resemble long-term credentials in the digital world.
Memberships, gaming assets, on-chain histories, AI identities, music copyrights, content revenue sharing—these all ultimately require a verifiable, transferable, programmable ownership structure.
NFTs are just one form of expression, so I even suspect that the term NFT might gradually disappear in the future.
Because users don't care about technical terms at all, just like today no one talks about using TCP/IP.
Users only care whether this thing is truly theirs.
I make this judgment because the biggest change in the past two years isn't price, but that infrastructure has finally started to mature.
Base, zkSync, Blast—these low-cost networks are making on-chain behavior increasingly resemble internet product experiences.
Buying an NFT used to be like operating a Cold War-era banking system; now many on-chain products are starting to resemble normal apps.
What truly made me feel that the industry is beginning to change is AI; many underestimate the impact of AI Agents on NFTs.
In the future, there will be a large number of NFTs not designed for humans.
AI will start to have its own collection preferences, content assets, training data licenses, and even on-chain identities.
By that stage, NFTs will no longer just be cultural commodities; they will become a standard for machines to recognize ownership and permissions.
You can even imagine that in the future, an AI music agent will automatically purchase a creator’s voice licensing NFT, generate songs, and automatically split royalties via on-chain protocols.
The entire process might involve no human participation.
So I don't think the next NFT cycle will be more crazy than 2021; quite the opposite, I believe it will be much calmer and much more dangerous than before.
Because the market is finally shifting from speculating on images to entering a true era of digital property rights.
And most people are still stuck at the monkey avatar stage.