Why Cloudflare Is Betting on Stablecoins for Agentic Payments

Agentic payments: Last week, internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare unveiled its Monetization Gateway, a new product that lets businesses charge AI agents for access to digital resources such as web pages, datasets, and APIs. At launch, payments will settle in stablecoins over x402, the agentic payments protocol Cloudflare is building alongside Coinbase and more than 20 other tech and payments firms.

• Why it matters: Stablecoin-based agentic payments have been widely discussed over the past year, but adoption remains limited. Since going live in May 2025, x402 has facilitated around $18 million in organic payment volume, mostly across early use cases such as access to APIs, data feeds, compute, and AI-generated content. Cloudflare’s integration could change that trajectory. As one of the internet’s largest infrastructure providers, used by ~20% of all websites, Cloudflare gives x402 a major distribution channel into a large base of businesses and web resources.

How it works: That distribution comes from making individual web requests payable. A website owner on Cloudflare sets rules for which pages, datasets, APIs, or tools require payment and at what price, down to individual requests worth as little as one cent. When an agent requests a paid resource, Cloudflare tells it what to pay. The agent then settles the payment in stablecoins via x402, resubmits the request with proof of payment, and receives access without creating an account, completing onboarding, or involving a human.

Inside Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway

The stablecoin unlock: Charging a cent per request is the part traditional card payments cannot do. Stripe’s standard U.S. pricing, for example, is 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, a fixed fee that makes cent-level payments uneconomical. Stablecoins help close that gap by letting agents pay for individual API calls that were previously too small to monetize, while cards are likely to remain the preferred rail for larger, consumer-facing payments, where buyer protections like chargebacks matter.

• "Usage-based price points are where agents live and where stablecoin-based micropayments shine. That's because stablecoins allow buyers to transfer tiny sums across the Internet, incurring negligible fees and settling in less than a second. This is not feasible with other payment rails today," the Cloudflare team wrote in their announcement post.

Cementing x402’s lead: If successful, the Monetization Gateway could strengthen x402’s position as the leading standard for crypto-based agentic payments. The protocol already accounts for more than 95% of transaction volume in the category, with Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) ranking second.

Outlook: The full impact of the integration will take time to become clear. Access to the Monetization Gateway remains limited to a customer waitlist, and Cloudflare has not detailed a broader rollout. In the meantime, other integrations could help drive activity: yesterday, Brave, the crypto-native browser with 120 million monthly active users, announced plans to integrate both x402 and MPP.

Peter Grosskopf is CTO and COO of AllUnity, a Frankfurt-based stablecoin issuer. The firm recently started helping businesses accept agentic payments through its euro, Swiss franc, and Swedish krona stablecoins.

Is Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway enough to take agentic commerce mainstream?

The Monetization Gateway is an important step in the right direction. By integrating x402, Cloudflare makes it easier for businesses to price digital resources and make them payable by agents, expanding the universe of goods and services agents can access.

But widespread adoption will require more than payment facilitation and a growing supply side. Several parts of the agentic commerce stack still need to mature before businesses can adopt it at scale.

1. Discovery: agents need a reliable way to find available products and services and decide which merchants to trust.
2. Checkout: once an agent has decided what to buy, businesses need a purchase flow built for agents, including the ability to bundle multiple purchases into a single payment.
3. Payout: businesses need a way to move the stablecoins they receive into the bank accounts and currencies they actually use in the real world.

That last point matters especially in Europe, and not only for agentic payments. Stablecoin payment activity is still largely denominated in U.S. dollars, while local businesses usually want to be paid in local currencies. For agentic commerce to scale, the stablecoin layer has to reflect the currencies in which businesses report and manage revenues.

Lucas Shin is a Product Engineer at Merit Systems, a New York-based startup building infrastructure for open agentic commerce.

What does agentic commerce look like today, and how could Cloudflare change it?

The supply side is growing fast. Over the past month, more than 1,300 new APIs have been registered across agentic payment platforms, roughly one every thirty minutes. What started with simple data endpoints is now expanding into property data, government files, ads data, podcast analysis, and legal filings. One reason: APIs can now be made agent-ready in about thirty minutes, even without deep coding experience. To solve some of the pitfalls that existing merchants have fallen into, we're actually about to open source a library to help anyone one-shot their x402 or MPP resources and make them instantly discoverable.

Demand is still narrower. Most of the current power users are not mainstream consumers, but professionals using agentic commerce to gain an edge, or agent-obsessed developers experimenting with agentic payments outside of their 9-5s. Go-to-market engineers, business development reps, developers, and hiring managers are using agents for lead generation, people and company enrichemnt, and ad research.

Longer-term, however, products like the Monetization Gateway are preparing to support a new type of user of a agentic commerce. Today, using agentic payments is a choice. But as AI adoption and reliance on agents accelerates, any website will be ready to charge an agent for each request, and businesses will have little reason to keep giving away data and content for free. Many will start charging by default. Users won’t really be choosing anymore. They’ll just hit paywalls as they go, and their agents will pay the small fees in the background.