An OpenSea executive believes the next big NFT cycle could look very different from the speculative craze that drove the market to more than $16 billion in 2022.

"It makes nothing but sense" for assets like collectible trading cards to become tokenized and traded onchain, OpenSea Chief Marketing Officer Adam Hollander said during an interview with The Block's Gareth Jenkinson at Consensus Miami.

Hollander argued that NFTs remain a valid technology for proving ownership of digital and physical assets, despite the crash in the values of profile-picture collections like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks.

"I think that we will see a resurgence," Hollander said. "But I think it might look a little different when we do than what people saw back in 2021 and 2022."

According to Hollander, the previous NFT boom became overrun by speculative traders, blinded by rapid jumps in dollar values instead of focusing on the underlying technology.

"A lot of people who were buying NFTs were not buying them because they actually wanted them," Hollander said. "They were treating NFTs more like a digital casino than respecting what they actually represent."

Hollander sees future adoption driven by tokenized collectibles like Pokémon cards and Rolex watches, digital tickets, gaming items, and AI tools. He also suggested that more recent advancements in artificial intelligence could accelerate NFT adoption by lowering the barrier to creating digital art, animation, games, and other online assets.

"It’s becoming easier and easier for virtually anybody to create amazing things," Hollander said.

OpenSea expansion

OpenSea's goal now, he said, is to create a platform where users can manage all their crypto assets, NFTs, and collectibles across multiple wallets and chains.

"I want all my assets, all my wallets, all of my blockchains, all in one place," Hollander said.

He added that OpenSea has been focused on simplifying user onboarding, adding Apple Pay-like fiat payments, and displaying tokenized assets in dollar terms instead of crypto pricing.

"People don't expect to see that that item costs 0.00-something Ethereum when they want to buy their $20 Pokémon card," Hollander said. "We need to be able to meet people where they are."

Hollander also addressed the proverbial elephant in the room — OpenSea's delayed SEA token launch. He said that those decisions ultimately sit with the OpenSea Foundation and that he did not personally have any further insight into the timetable.

"If a token is launched and it is nothing more than a memecoin to be launched, dropped, and forgotten, then it doesn't really deliver value to anybody," Hollander said.