That's probably their strategy of handling 402 Payment Required[1]. They want to become the platform over which auctions for AI crawlers buying rights to use content take place.
Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an even bigger giant.
This reminded me of Gates' "The Road Ahead" book (late 90s if I recall) prediction that marketers would eventually be able to pay a dime to get an email in your inbox, if only the future economy could figure out micro-transactions.
I agree with you that we're moving away from banner ads to some novel way of monetizing traffic, and therefore content published by authentic human beings.
Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not need user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine to machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security profile is different (no credit card fraud)
Of course Cloudflare is riding the stablecoin hype here a bit. At least they are large enough they might be pull this off
> Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not need user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine to machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security profile is different (no credit card fraud)
Just to note, that Cloudflare is a public company which means that they have both internal and external auditors.
They definitely need to worry about fraud, but the first two things they need to worry about are sanctions screening (don't do business with the four countries the US doesn't like) and AML (anti-money laundering).
Stablecoins are a potentially huge vector for this kind of badness, so it would be unwise for Cloudflare to try to yolo this (but they probably will, because almost all tech companies try to work with finance this way).
> Stablecoins are a potentially huge vector for this kind of badness, so it would be unwise for Cloudflare to try to yolo this (but they probably will, because almost all tech companies try to work with finance this way).
Do you have any proof for this assertion or is it time to milk crypto cynicism for upvotes on this site again? The GENIUS Act (which regulates stablecoins) specifically calls out complying with AML and sanctions lists. So there's a clear regulatory regime.
Yes indeed this is clearly delineated in the GENIUS Act regulating Stablecoins:
> Issuers would be subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) would be required to write tailored anti-money-laundering (AML) rules. S. 1582 would require that FinCEN facilitate "novel methods … to detect illicit activity involving digital assets." S. 1582 would require issuers to certify that they have implemented AML and sanctions compliance programs. The bill would prohibit anyone who has been convicted of certain financial crimes of being an officer or director of an issuer.
OFAC compliance is a regular thing in Internet companies. AWS and Cloudflare maintain blocklists designed to help other companies stay OFAC compliant and agree with US sanctions lists. These are all well-known.
Stablecoins are well established now, having regulation both in the US and in the EU to address risks, including sanctions. They are used by several public companies including Stripe, PayPal and Shopify.
What is the conceptual difference between Cloudflare and the companies in that list? We all love a David vs Goliath story, but haven’t we learned anything after buying the “Don’t Be Evil” bullshit?
Cloudflare sells network services. You want services, you can buy services. It isn't a vertically integrated monstrosity where every transaction bounces around departments and partners having value extracted that you didn't want extracted. Some things are even free or at cost, not freemium just-sign-this-user-agreement-you-won't-feel-a-thing.
But certainly worth keeping an eye on, especially as they branch out into things like stable coins and payment processing.
Cloudflare sells the service of making your life more annoying, to people who aren't you, and have no reason to make your life more annoying, but Cloudflare didn't tell them it would, and also they don't really care either way.
Cloudflare is creating a massive single nexus for future corruption at the hands of an oppressive government or "active investors" to impact almost everyone.
This are zero details on how it's supposed to work, or how it avoids the problem traditional crypto. “Instant global transactions” sound good in theory, but it has never been a technological problem, purely a regulatory one. Govts. don't like this happening. They want oversight, especially for cross border transactions.
regulation from the US side sounds open with the genius act, plus the current admin is pro crypto. Regulations from other govs dont matter as they will just "geo block" countries that dont allow it and users will just bounce into the service with a vpn or proxy at their own risk, other crypto like btc , xrp has been used to cross border trade for a decade now even in countries with outright bans, the entities using it just work around it e.g have an operation in a country were its allowed or in the case of weak enforcement just dont care
Im not fully knowledgeable about banks, but i always thought the reason why regulation was so hard was because no one could agree on a common ground obvs each country wants to keep their moat with their own currency, but with crypto anyone can opt in at their own risk
Current US admin is pro grift, bribery, and embezzlement.
Crypto is a just a tool that enables that. They have no interest whatsoever in democratization, self-custodial finance, or frictionless payments across borders for anyone but themselves.
Direct p2p payments a "hard problem" because it directly contradicts what we consider to be one of the central pillars of national sovereignty, control over your national currency.
Crypto as a whole is in denial about this because there is no path forward without expecting nations to either give up one of their most effective levers of control, or expecting them to turn a blind eye to external actors eroding that control in real time.
> what we consider to be one of the central pillars of national sovereignty, control over your national currency.
Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a lot of (sovereign) countries in the world. Probably the most famous example being the Euro, and maybe the closest example to you is the United States Dollar which is an official currency in countries that have no control over the currency itself.
> Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a lot of (sovereign) countries in the world.
The CEO of coinbase recently said on a podcast that in the future, he expects stablecoins to wipe out all but ten currencies in the world.
This is a ludicrous statement that's gonna get Coinbase banned from many of these countries, and end up being subject to much, much more regulation than they expect.
Like, just because the US is currently pro-crypto doesn't mean that the rest of the global regulators have changed.
.... Why would Coinbase be banned for saying something like this, what? At most these countries will probably prevent their citizens from using cryptocurrency like the Chinese government's position. Though my guess is that some smaller countries with less sophisticated monetary regimes may actually be excited about escaping the petrodollar world economy.
I agree on the current admin being pro grift and just extracting as much as they can, but crypto works because it overwhelms the system, if a million people rushed a military base at the same time no matter how great the defense is, the base will be breached.
I dont have financial/economic knowledge to argue my point to a full extent, but ive been under the assumption that p2p payments was only hard because various countries could not find a common ground, not only because of keeping control , but also getting laws changed/passed in most democratic nations is hard and might not be worth the scrutiny, entities in charge of their country banking system and regulations also find it difficult to bring radical ideas
There has been a handful of items that have bypassed all of this way before crypto and that is precious metals & gem stones like gold, silver, ruby, emerald etc you could be in the middle of africa and you will find someone who will easily buy your gold. Crypto is just like this and instead of mother nature dictating for us what material is rare , we as the consumers decide which crypto protocol, dapp, token ,blockchain etc to use and with competiton a better or improved system will always arise and trading gold hasnt eroded control for most nations, people still want hard cash for their day to day.
Denial about what national sovereignty means in regards to currency controls and what that means for crypto orgs who want to operate in the stable coin or off ramp space?
Plenty of examples of orgs either failing or entirely abandoning their crypto "principles" like privacy and decentralization just to get rubber stamped by various regulatory agencies.
Nobody is in denial about the politics and game theory of adoption.
It seems you are in denial about the rate of crypto rails adoption. Stable coins seem to be part of the US national strategy for creating some extra demand for US debt so this goes fully against your previous comment. Decentralized debt markets are growing. Wall Street is dipping its toes more and more in tokenization and more and more organizations are interested in that. That list goes on.
It’s frankly tiring to debate this on HN. The fact is, blockchains are just a technology so they are adopted in all sorts of of ways which sometimes align with decentralization ethos and sometimes not. Ethereum and Bitcoin seems to be getting more adoption, as bearer assets that are independent and have a predictable issuance rate, and in a world with so much debt they can only continue to gain more market share.
Every crypto project runs head first into this problem.
Layers and layers of technical bullshit that never addresses the fact that no government in the world wants to allow frictionless peer to peer payments across borders.
CF is likely building this to service an internal need to collect micropayments for some kind of pay to view "captcha", and all the rest is just highly paid PR spin.
Could someone perhaps provide a steelman argument for this? My own personal read on this is really cynical...
As per NIST's recommendations[1] it seems like a blockchain doesn't make sense for this use case.
From where I stand it seems like Cloudflare is side-stepping the scrutiny, regulations and perhaps most pertinently the cost that would govern a similar offering using traditional financial instruments.
Microtransactions are unworkable with traditional financial instruments. Electronic funds transfers and online credit card transfers must (by law) be reversible, and reversibility means cost to the issuer, which means fees for the merchant (in this case Cloudflare). Transactions under a dollar stop making financial sense, god forbid alone anything like a fraction of a cent.
In 2024 Congress signed a law that the transfer of digital assets does NOT count as an electronic funds transfer. This was a huge legislative victory for crypto, which had previously sat in regulatory limbo. The reason why you didn't see anybody using cryptocurrency as, well, currency, and its only use seemed to be as a speculative asset, was because nobody was sure if transferring crypto counted as an EFT, and the CFPB refused to make a decision one way or the other.
Why did Cloudflare choose to use cryptocurrency? They could technically use any digital asset. They could design their own custom digital asset used to facilitate transactions (hell, use Cloudflare stock as the currency), but they would just be reinventing cryptocurrency, but worse, and have to fight an uphill battle to get trust and adoption and risk regulatory scrutiny. A few months ago, Congress signed a law that provided a regulatory framework for stablecoins. These assets are "stable" because they are pegged 1:1 with USDs.
So, stablecoins have emerged in 2025 as the clear winner for microtransactions on marketplaces. No worrying about liability for reversibility. Clear regulatory framework (developing a custom solution risks a CFPB investigation). 1-1 USD backing makes customers trust you more, for good reason. AML checking and sanctions list checking happens at the currency conversion to / from USD, which dramatically simplifies your engineering, latency, and risk requirements.
The only good thing about Blockchain today is Bitcoin's scarcity.
Almost every other project out there would be better off as a centralized project — heck, many of them are centralized, while claiming to hold on to the decentralized cyberpunk ethos — if not being outright scams.
I've personally found one compelling use case, decentralised DNS, I'm sure there are other projects attempting this but the one I'm familiar with is Namecoin[1]
I'm working on a project that is based on blockchain for the key purpose of making the data on it effectively available to all to add to and to consume -- basically providing a public utility for the data hosting.
It's not a path to riches (I can see a possible lifestyle business out of it), it's about giving people new opportunities.
I've been chewing on this for years and only now that Claude has shown up do I have a partner to help me make this work.
I do have some experience working on blockchain for a startup (non-ICO) that helped inspire me, but the experience itself bordered on being PTSD-inducing. The people I worked with were True Believers of Crypto, but the product we were building used crypto solely to tell their investors it was a blockchain company -- not that their product leveraged it at all.
Look what is going on with Google and Android apps.
You let Cloudflare do things like that, and in a few years you will have to register with them using your passport to have the right to browse website. "For your safety".
Seems like i should be concerned that the company running our edge infastructure decided to expand into crypto...how is this not the signal to jump ship...
Cloudflare sits in the middle of a vast amount of web traffic now, offering easy global payments and skimming off the top of that is going to be very profitable potentially.
I don't trust Cloudflare, the larger they get the bigger the abuse potential becomes.
CF: No criminal convictions I know about. No reason to distrust yet. Most controversies seem to be about providing services to political organisations.
GCP: Earth Engine is quite good, but Google have multiple criminal convictions. As a repeat offender they should be avoided at all costs. They are just so exceptionally good at manipulating people, markets and academia it's genuinely terrifying.
Azure: Microsoft still don't take security seriously. They're just a bit bumbly, not really smart enough to be as terrifying as Google.
AWS: Pretty useful, annoying to use, distrust because I can't bear Amazon's use of dark patterns in consumer products.
Their customers pay them to be the front door to their websites. Customers want a way to reduce the massive traffic from AI crawling, to block malicious traffic, and to be compensated for access.
That leaves Cloudflare well positioned to implement a pay-for-access check along with all of the existing bot services they offer. AI crawling goes from a threat to a win if I can serve OpenAI a demand to pay for each request. Bot abuse goes down if traffic isn’t free. Businesses like journalism become stable again if readers pay for content rather than relying on advertisers to subsidize it.
But then why do a blockchain thing? Why not just make CloudflareBucks they centrally control? Surely that is much easier to monetize and cheaper to implement.
... which will then be immediately destroyed by law because it gives the actual tax man a single target, along with a money flow that comes from within the control of the tax man.
PLUS just imagine how many corrupt politicians will be tempted to force these payments to go through their company.
Their customers are hit the hardest by the shift away from google search to AI. They probably are the right company to try to help them monetize their content.
What does the traffic from Google Search look like though?
I can't imagine all the low effort content farms that were providing things like dictionary definitions or ridiculously elongated ad-stuffed versions of kitchen recipes are doing too hot under the pressure from AI Overviews. And they can't be the only ones impacted.
I agree this makes little sense for Cloudflare to jump on the crypto bandwagon now. Maybe they want to retain some talent by turning this into an official project.
Is the premise that it makes more sense for an AI agent to pay in prepurchased stablecoin tokens instead of direct access to a credit card?
They are the moat between AI content crawlers and websites. They will probably start charging a fee and a stablecoin is a good way to do that globally.
Good luck with the regulatory process in Europe. Cloudflare is going to have to register as a financial institution. There's no way they will be able to roll this out globally.
No. It isn't. Here's what happened to all the micropayments network platforms that competed with the internet:
The gatekeepers (telecoms) first decided they were going to publish things themselves too, which had zero success, then to pay themselves more than anyone on the platform, then when that still didn't work they kicked everyone else off the platform with various excuses (porn, crime, getting money from outside the platform, promoting non-sanctioned shows, ... the big thing that was successful were mail and chatrooms)
The problem is that these companies were always willing (after a short while) to damage the economics of the infrastructure as a whole, just to increase their own share (for example per-email charges). Eventually they had close to 100% ... of nothing.
And the irony is that because of these companies constantly trying to move into content and apps, destroying their own system more and more by crude attempts to force people into their content the only thing that remains of these systems ... is publishers. They couldn't really improve their apps, since that cost them money. They quickly discovered to use money as a way to avoid friction on their apps ... and then no business leader ever approved removing friction anywhere.
I built five different apps that pay-per-use with microtransactions and users were uninterested. The key reason I think is, and something one user stated to me explicitly, is that microtransactions change interactions from a social gratis model to a business transaction.
Grimmer than paying with your soul? With targeting kids with ads for gambling, ultra-rightwing podcssters, and fucked up sexual content? I find it hard to believe.
For those wondering, its a stablecoin. So you put in a dollar, you get back a dollar. This makes sense, especially for Cloudflare. It also makes a lot of sense to a degree, I don't imagine anyone trusting an AI to just hand over stablecoins for transactions.
It's worth noting that there's nothing different between a stablecoin with a 1-to-1 ratio, and any entity that holds deposits. Like a bank Paypal, Stripe. Whether you call them Dollars or BrandDollars, if it has a 1to1 ratio, it's actually a dollar.
People are confused because they usually can't distinguish between net emission and gross emission, if you hold a deposit or a loan, you have increased the gross amount of dollars in the economy, but of course you have created an equivalent liability. There's no semantic or technical difference between loaning a dollar, holding a dollar in deposit, or issuing a dollar-equivalent token.
At least they could've used one of the many existing systems... Brave attention token for example is right there and there's a few other similar projects. They didn't even acknowledge alternative efforts.
ik alot of people on here hate crypto, tether has been making billions each quarter for the last few years. I dont think there's any more real thought to this, than the genius act providing a framework and cf trying to get easy money
The genius act will change how fintech and neobanks operate, so expect to see more companies offering similar services
That's probably their strategy of handling 402 Payment Required[1]. They want to become the platform over which auctions for AI crawlers buying rights to use content take place.
Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an even bigger giant.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Sta...
This reminded me of Gates' "The Road Ahead" book (late 90s if I recall) prediction that marketers would eventually be able to pay a dime to get an email in your inbox, if only the future economy could figure out micro-transactions.
I agree with you that we're moving away from banner ads to some novel way of monetizing traffic, and therefore content published by authentic human beings.
What if people could choose to donate their devices' computing power in return for some Netcoin or whatever?
You can do this. Several services pay you real money (not much) in exchange for letting AI scrapers use you as a proxy. It's completely legal (AFAIK).
Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not need user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine to machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security profile is different (no credit card fraud)
Of course Cloudflare is riding the stablecoin hype here a bit. At least they are large enough they might be pull this off
> Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not need user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine to machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security profile is different (no credit card fraud)
Just to note, that Cloudflare is a public company which means that they have both internal and external auditors.
They definitely need to worry about fraud, but the first two things they need to worry about are sanctions screening (don't do business with the four countries the US doesn't like) and AML (anti-money laundering).
Stablecoins are a potentially huge vector for this kind of badness, so it would be unwise for Cloudflare to try to yolo this (but they probably will, because almost all tech companies try to work with finance this way).
> Stablecoins are a potentially huge vector for this kind of badness, so it would be unwise for Cloudflare to try to yolo this (but they probably will, because almost all tech companies try to work with finance this way).
Do you have any proof for this assertion or is it time to milk crypto cynicism for upvotes on this site again? The GENIUS Act (which regulates stablecoins) specifically calls out complying with AML and sanctions lists. So there's a clear regulatory regime.
> sanctions screening (don't do business with the four countries the US doesn't like)
Not just countries; a changing list of organizations and individuals as well.
Yes indeed this is clearly delineated in the GENIUS Act regulating Stablecoins:
> Issuers would be subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) would be required to write tailored anti-money-laundering (AML) rules. S. 1582 would require that FinCEN facilitate "novel methods … to detect illicit activity involving digital assets." S. 1582 would require issuers to certify that they have implemented AML and sanctions compliance programs. The bill would prohibit anyone who has been convicted of certain financial crimes of being an officer or director of an issuer.
OFAC compliance is a regular thing in Internet companies. AWS and Cloudflare maintain blocklists designed to help other companies stay OFAC compliant and agree with US sanctions lists. These are all well-known.
Stablecoins are well established now, having regulation both in the US and in the EU to address risks, including sanctions. They are used by several public companies including Stripe, PayPal and Shopify.
English version of the docs[1] since the version linked above is in German.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
> Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an even bigger giant.
As opposed to all the other giants. Clouflare is the only one with the heft to take on Google, AWS, Azure, etc.
What is the conceptual difference between Cloudflare and the companies in that list? We all love a David vs Goliath story, but haven’t we learned anything after buying the “Don’t Be Evil” bullshit?
Cloudflare sells network services. You want services, you can buy services. It isn't a vertically integrated monstrosity where every transaction bounces around departments and partners having value extracted that you didn't want extracted. Some things are even free or at cost, not freemium just-sign-this-user-agreement-you-won't-feel-a-thing.
But certainly worth keeping an eye on, especially as they branch out into things like stable coins and payment processing.
Cloudflare sells the service of making your life more annoying, to people who aren't you, and have no reason to make your life more annoying, but Cloudflare didn't tell them it would, and also they don't really care either way.
There is no difference if you go and look at Cloudflares major shareholders.
You could say the same for any company in the sp500.
Correct and then in the private markets it’s 5 big groups. Sounds like we have a problem here!
They are taking on monopolists.
Cloudflare only has a market cap of ~75 b. So there a plenty of bigger giants out there.
I am trying to understand the direction of your comment. It seems to respond to
> Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an even bigger giant.
Are you proposing that you do not share OPs sentiment, since there are larger companies?
2 sided.
- Cloudflare is smaller in market cap than you would think, they are not "big tech" as to how I would consider it
- have been them following for years and there is nothing atm. that would indicate of them being "evil"
Cloudflare is creating a massive single nexus for future corruption at the hands of an oppressive government or "active investors" to impact almost everyone.
They would mean the end of US tech dominance globally.
Azure, AWS, Meta and probably even Alphabet
Huh? Cloudflare is a Delaware company, same as the ones you listed.
Plenty of german companies supplied the nazis and survived ww2.
Cloudflare suddenly getting into the money laundering business?
This are zero details on how it's supposed to work, or how it avoids the problem traditional crypto. “Instant global transactions” sound good in theory, but it has never been a technological problem, purely a regulatory one. Govts. don't like this happening. They want oversight, especially for cross border transactions.
The coins can be just registered to an id. I don't like these, but tech like GNU Teller already enable it even with decent privacy.
regulation from the US side sounds open with the genius act, plus the current admin is pro crypto. Regulations from other govs dont matter as they will just "geo block" countries that dont allow it and users will just bounce into the service with a vpn or proxy at their own risk, other crypto like btc , xrp has been used to cross border trade for a decade now even in countries with outright bans, the entities using it just work around it e.g have an operation in a country were its allowed or in the case of weak enforcement just dont care
Im not fully knowledgeable about banks, but i always thought the reason why regulation was so hard was because no one could agree on a common ground obvs each country wants to keep their moat with their own currency, but with crypto anyone can opt in at their own risk
Current US admin is pro grift, bribery, and embezzlement.
Crypto is a just a tool that enables that. They have no interest whatsoever in democratization, self-custodial finance, or frictionless payments across borders for anyone but themselves.
Direct p2p payments a "hard problem" because it directly contradicts what we consider to be one of the central pillars of national sovereignty, control over your national currency.
Crypto as a whole is in denial about this because there is no path forward without expecting nations to either give up one of their most effective levers of control, or expecting them to turn a blind eye to external actors eroding that control in real time.
> what we consider to be one of the central pillars of national sovereignty, control over your national currency.
Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a lot of (sovereign) countries in the world. Probably the most famous example being the Euro, and maybe the closest example to you is the United States Dollar which is an official currency in countries that have no control over the currency itself.
> Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a lot of (sovereign) countries in the world.
The CEO of coinbase recently said on a podcast that in the future, he expects stablecoins to wipe out all but ten currencies in the world.
This is a ludicrous statement that's gonna get Coinbase banned from many of these countries, and end up being subject to much, much more regulation than they expect.
Like, just because the US is currently pro-crypto doesn't mean that the rest of the global regulators have changed.
.... Why would Coinbase be banned for saying something like this, what? At most these countries will probably prevent their citizens from using cryptocurrency like the Chinese government's position. Though my guess is that some smaller countries with less sophisticated monetary regimes may actually be excited about escaping the petrodollar world economy.
Not in the mood to debate easily google-able concepts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_sovereignty
I agree on the current admin being pro grift and just extracting as much as they can, but crypto works because it overwhelms the system, if a million people rushed a military base at the same time no matter how great the defense is, the base will be breached.
I dont have financial/economic knowledge to argue my point to a full extent, but ive been under the assumption that p2p payments was only hard because various countries could not find a common ground, not only because of keeping control , but also getting laws changed/passed in most democratic nations is hard and might not be worth the scrutiny, entities in charge of their country banking system and regulations also find it difficult to bring radical ideas
There has been a handful of items that have bypassed all of this way before crypto and that is precious metals & gem stones like gold, silver, ruby, emerald etc you could be in the middle of africa and you will find someone who will easily buy your gold. Crypto is just like this and instead of mother nature dictating for us what material is rare , we as the consumers decide which crypto protocol, dapp, token ,blockchain etc to use and with competiton a better or improved system will always arise and trading gold hasnt eroded control for most nations, people still want hard cash for their day to day.
I will gladly send you crypto for any gold you can get your hands on.
[flagged]
Your question is unclear.
Denial about what national sovereignty means in regards to currency controls and what that means for crypto orgs who want to operate in the stable coin or off ramp space?
Plenty of examples of orgs either failing or entirely abandoning their crypto "principles" like privacy and decentralization just to get rubber stamped by various regulatory agencies.
Nobody is in denial about the politics and game theory of adoption.
It seems you are in denial about the rate of crypto rails adoption. Stable coins seem to be part of the US national strategy for creating some extra demand for US debt so this goes fully against your previous comment. Decentralized debt markets are growing. Wall Street is dipping its toes more and more in tokenization and more and more organizations are interested in that. That list goes on.
It’s frankly tiring to debate this on HN. The fact is, blockchains are just a technology so they are adopted in all sorts of of ways which sometimes align with decentralization ethos and sometimes not. Ethereum and Bitcoin seems to be getting more adoption, as bearer assets that are independent and have a predictable issuance rate, and in a world with so much debt they can only continue to gain more market share.
So I really don’t know where you’re coming from.
Clinging to unfounded beliefs about a fundamentally flawed ideology is exhausting.
What is that fundamentally flawed ideology?
Every crypto project runs head first into this problem.
Layers and layers of technical bullshit that never addresses the fact that no government in the world wants to allow frictionless peer to peer payments across borders.
CF is likely building this to service an internal need to collect micropayments for some kind of pay to view "captcha", and all the rest is just highly paid PR spin.
Could someone perhaps provide a steelman argument for this? My own personal read on this is really cynical...
As per NIST's recommendations[1] it seems like a blockchain doesn't make sense for this use case.
From where I stand it seems like Cloudflare is side-stepping the scrutiny, regulations and perhaps most pertinently the cost that would govern a similar offering using traditional financial instruments.
[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut...
Microtransactions are unworkable with traditional financial instruments. Electronic funds transfers and online credit card transfers must (by law) be reversible, and reversibility means cost to the issuer, which means fees for the merchant (in this case Cloudflare). Transactions under a dollar stop making financial sense, god forbid alone anything like a fraction of a cent.
In 2024 Congress signed a law that the transfer of digital assets does NOT count as an electronic funds transfer. This was a huge legislative victory for crypto, which had previously sat in regulatory limbo. The reason why you didn't see anybody using cryptocurrency as, well, currency, and its only use seemed to be as a speculative asset, was because nobody was sure if transferring crypto counted as an EFT, and the CFPB refused to make a decision one way or the other.
Why did Cloudflare choose to use cryptocurrency? They could technically use any digital asset. They could design their own custom digital asset used to facilitate transactions (hell, use Cloudflare stock as the currency), but they would just be reinventing cryptocurrency, but worse, and have to fight an uphill battle to get trust and adoption and risk regulatory scrutiny. A few months ago, Congress signed a law that provided a regulatory framework for stablecoins. These assets are "stable" because they are pegged 1:1 with USDs.
So, stablecoins have emerged in 2025 as the clear winner for microtransactions on marketplaces. No worrying about liability for reversibility. Clear regulatory framework (developing a custom solution risks a CFPB investigation). 1-1 USD backing makes customers trust you more, for good reason. AML checking and sanctions list checking happens at the currency conversion to / from USD, which dramatically simplifies your engineering, latency, and risk requirements.
The only good thing about Blockchain today is Bitcoin's scarcity.
Almost every other project out there would be better off as a centralized project — heck, many of them are centralized, while claiming to hold on to the decentralized cyberpunk ethos — if not being outright scams.
I've personally found one compelling use case, decentralised DNS, I'm sure there are other projects attempting this but the one I'm familiar with is Namecoin[1]
[1] https://www.namecoin.org/
Namecoin would make sense on a technical level if anyone were actually using it, but nobody is.
ENS has existed for a while and has very little traction.
I'm working on a project that is based on blockchain for the key purpose of making the data on it effectively available to all to add to and to consume -- basically providing a public utility for the data hosting.
It's not a path to riches (I can see a possible lifestyle business out of it), it's about giving people new opportunities.
I've been chewing on this for years and only now that Claude has shown up do I have a partner to help me make this work.
I do have some experience working on blockchain for a startup (non-ICO) that helped inspire me, but the experience itself bordered on being PTSD-inducing. The people I worked with were True Believers of Crypto, but the product we were building used crypto solely to tell their investors it was a blockchain company -- not that their product leveraged it at all.
Look what is going on with Google and Android apps.
You let Cloudflare do things like that, and in a few years you will have to register with them using your passport to have the right to browse website. "For your safety".
For some reason, I thought this was an off-season April fools joke.
Seems like i should be concerned that the company running our edge infastructure decided to expand into crypto...how is this not the signal to jump ship...
Why would cloudflare be the company to do this?
Rent seeking probably.
Cloudflare sits in the middle of a vast amount of web traffic now, offering easy global payments and skimming off the top of that is going to be very profitable potentially.
I don't trust Cloudflare, the larger they get the bigger the abuse potential becomes.
But of all the players, Cloudflare is the best one for this kind of thing.
Curious: how do you feel about AWS, Azure, GCP?
CF: No criminal convictions I know about. No reason to distrust yet. Most controversies seem to be about providing services to political organisations.
GCP: Earth Engine is quite good, but Google have multiple criminal convictions. As a repeat offender they should be avoided at all costs. They are just so exceptionally good at manipulating people, markets and academia it's genuinely terrifying.
Azure: Microsoft still don't take security seriously. They're just a bit bumbly, not really smart enough to be as terrifying as Google.
AWS: Pretty useful, annoying to use, distrust because I can't bear Amazon's use of dark patterns in consumer products.
Same way I do about any large corporation, I don't trust them.
You work for Cloudflare, so is your comment more a "we're no different" statement than genuine curiosity about their opinion?
Genuinely curious.
You mean Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet?
Their customers pay them to be the front door to their websites. Customers want a way to reduce the massive traffic from AI crawling, to block malicious traffic, and to be compensated for access.
That leaves Cloudflare well positioned to implement a pay-for-access check along with all of the existing bot services they offer. AI crawling goes from a threat to a win if I can serve OpenAI a demand to pay for each request. Bot abuse goes down if traffic isn’t free. Businesses like journalism become stable again if readers pay for content rather than relying on advertisers to subsidize it.
At least its not facebook or microsoft.
But the better question would be, who should be the company (or entity) we should trust to do such a thing?
MiTM is their business. Obviously mitming of financial transactions is the most profitable business of all.
I dunno, running for president of the US and launching a crypto coin seems pretty profitable.
Because they are establishing themselves as "the gatekeeper of the internet".
Because their customers want to monetize AI crawlers
Finally build an infrastructure for real micro transactions. First for AI agents to access paid content, then for consumer to access content.
So they can directly monetize page views with their own token and fully embrace the role of internet gatekeeper / tax man.
But then why do a blockchain thing? Why not just make CloudflareBucks they centrally control? Surely that is much easier to monetize and cheaper to implement.
Less regulation to get in the way of the blatant corruption.
... which will then be immediately destroyed by law because it gives the actual tax man a single target, along with a money flow that comes from within the control of the tax man.
PLUS just imagine how many corrupt politicians will be tempted to force these payments to go through their company.
rule of law no longer exists in the US and their large corporations are filling the gap.
Their customers are hit the hardest by the shift away from google search to AI. They probably are the right company to try to help them monetize their content.
Google search is used more now than ever…
What does the traffic from Google Search look like though?
I can't imagine all the low effort content farms that were providing things like dictionary definitions or ridiculously elongated ad-stuffed versions of kitchen recipes are doing too hot under the pressure from AI Overviews. And they can't be the only ones impacted.
I agree this makes little sense for Cloudflare to jump on the crypto bandwagon now. Maybe they want to retain some talent by turning this into an official project.
Is the premise that it makes more sense for an AI agent to pay in prepurchased stablecoin tokens instead of direct access to a credit card?
They are the moat between AI content crawlers and websites. They will probably start charging a fee and a stablecoin is a good way to do that globally.
Good luck with the regulatory process in Europe. Cloudflare is going to have to register as a financial institution. There's no way they will be able to roll this out globally.
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Isn’t that better than advertising? Of course, there’s the cognitive burden of micro payments (https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-mental-accounting-...) so not sure it will catch on. But for agents it might.
No. It isn't. Here's what happened to all the micropayments network platforms that competed with the internet:
The gatekeepers (telecoms) first decided they were going to publish things themselves too, which had zero success, then to pay themselves more than anyone on the platform, then when that still didn't work they kicked everyone else off the platform with various excuses (porn, crime, getting money from outside the platform, promoting non-sanctioned shows, ... the big thing that was successful were mail and chatrooms)
The problem is that these companies were always willing (after a short while) to damage the economics of the infrastructure as a whole, just to increase their own share (for example per-email charges). Eventually they had close to 100% ... of nothing.
And the irony is that because of these companies constantly trying to move into content and apps, destroying their own system more and more by crude attempts to force people into their content the only thing that remains of these systems ... is publishers. They couldn't really improve their apps, since that cost them money. They quickly discovered to use money as a way to avoid friction on their apps ... and then no business leader ever approved removing friction anywhere.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL
I can vouch for this fact: an hallucinatory moment when a manager defended the logic of pay-per-email...
I built five different apps that pay-per-use with microtransactions and users were uninterested. The key reason I think is, and something one user stated to me explicitly, is that microtransactions change interactions from a social gratis model to a business transaction.
I’d actually prefer spending a few pennies to read an article vs. the status quo of being inundated with ads and trackers.
Big business: Why not both?
This argument is the endgame of the chef slowly boiling the frog.
The consensus on HN is that "if you are not paying, you are the product". Now you'll pay, and you'll not be the product anymore. Right?
Look up how logical implication works
> Business agents could be instructed to pay suppliers when a delivery is confirmed.
What could go wrong?
Grimmer than paying with your soul? With targeting kids with ads for gambling, ultra-rightwing podcssters, and fucked up sexual content? I find it hard to believe.
For those wondering, its a stablecoin. So you put in a dollar, you get back a dollar. This makes sense, especially for Cloudflare. It also makes a lot of sense to a degree, I don't imagine anyone trusting an AI to just hand over stablecoins for transactions.
"So you put in a dollar, you get back a dollar."
Until you don't.
There are dozens of examples of failed stable coins, to the point that they are now a meme in the crypto community.
Sure, but this is a very well established firm, not some off-shoot crypto startup.
lmao, never heard that before.
It's worth noting that there's nothing different between a stablecoin with a 1-to-1 ratio, and any entity that holds deposits. Like a bank Paypal, Stripe. Whether you call them Dollars or BrandDollars, if it has a 1to1 ratio, it's actually a dollar.
People are confused because they usually can't distinguish between net emission and gross emission, if you hold a deposit or a loan, you have increased the gross amount of dollars in the economy, but of course you have created an equivalent liability. There's no semantic or technical difference between loaning a dollar, holding a dollar in deposit, or issuing a dollar-equivalent token.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45380382
In the words of J Jonah Jameson: “You serious?”
”There’s no bubble!”
Well time to move my DNS off of CF again.
At least they could've used one of the many existing systems... Brave attention token for example is right there and there's a few other similar projects. They didn't even acknowledge alternative efforts.
ik alot of people on here hate crypto, tether has been making billions each quarter for the last few years. I dont think there's any more real thought to this, than the genius act providing a framework and cf trying to get easy money
The genius act will change how fintech and neobanks operate, so expect to see more companies offering similar services
Average HN commenter is a solid counter signal for investors. Kind of like Cramer just for tech.