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Cloudflare launches stablecoin payment gateway for AI agents
Cloudflare is expanding into the stablecoin micropayment market with the launch of its Monetization Gateway. The product, which debuted on July 1, 2026, enables sellers to charge for web resources using USDC settled on the Base and Polygon networks. The system utilizes x402, a revived version of the HTTP 402 status code, to facilitate near-instant transactions with minimal fees.
Will Papper, Cloudflare’s Director of Product for agent payments, suggests that the architecture could be modeled after Ethereum’s original sharding design. While Ethereum shifted its roadmap toward a rollup-centric model because sharding proved too complex for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, Papper argues that sharding is well-suited for payments. He notes that unlike DeFi, where price discrepancies across shards create friction, payments are simpler because 'a dollar is a dollar.'
The primary target for this technology is autonomous AI agents that require high-frequency, sub-cent payments to access APIs, data, or computational power—a scale of 5 to 50 million transactions per second that traditional credit card rails cannot economically support.
Entities
Base · Cloudflare · Ethereum · Polygon · Will Papper
Claims
What the coverage asserts, and how many sources carry each claim.
- [○ 1 SOURCE] Cloudflare launched a Monetization Gateway on July 1, 2026, allowing sellers to charge for web resources using USDC stablecoin payments. cryptobriefing.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] The Monetization Gateway uses the x402 protocol, a revived version of the HTTP 402 status code, optimized for stablecoin transactions. cryptobriefing.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] The payment product is designed to facilitate micropayments between AI agents for accessing APIs, data feeds, or computational resources. cryptobriefing.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] Stablecoin payments through the gateway are settled on the Base and Polygon networks. cryptobriefing.com
- [○ 1 SOURCE] Ethereum's original sharding design could work for stablecoin payments because payments avoid the pricing issues that make shards difficult for DeFi. unchainedcrypto.com