Cloudflare recently announced the launch of its monetization program via the Coinbase-led x402 machine payments standard. x402, which lets AI agents pay for data online with crypto, has been gaining steam among the AI-pilled, as it unlocks more capable agent interactions with the open web.
Cloudflare, founded in 2009, has grown from a DDoS mitigation and content delivery network (CDN) provider into one of the internet’s foundational infrastructure companies.
The company, which launched publicly in 2010, had the mission to make web performance and security accessible to everyone, not just large enterprises. Today, Cloudflare powers approximately 20-23% of all websites globally, handles tens of millions of HTTP requests per second across 330+ cities in over 100 countries, touching a significant portion of global internet traffic.
As a result of their adoption and security offering to large portions of the open web, CloudFlare’s integration of x402 is a major development for the structure of the internet. Websites that are increasingly inaccessible to the massive data demands from AI can now sell that data to AI agents for crypto. CloudFlare’s implementation only mentions Stablecoins such as USDC, the Open USD standard, but the protocol supports Bitcoin on-chain and is actively exploring integration of the Lightning network.
