Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says crypto will need to support internet-scale stablecoin micropayments if AI agents are going to coexist with the open web. In a Bankless interview on May 25, Prince argued that the internet’s ad-based business model is breaking as AI bots consume content without sending human traffic back to publishers.
Why Crypto Stablecoins Need 100 Million TPS
Prince framed the issue as less a bandwidth crisis than an economic one. Cloudflare, he said, expects AI bot traffic to exceed human internet traffic in the first half of 2027, a shift that will massively increase the number of requests hitting websites. Technically, he said, the internet can probably absorb that pressure. The harder question is who pays for the servers, security, publishing and infrastructure underneath it.
“The big question though is what’s the business model going to be and who’s going to pay for it,” Prince said. “If the business model of the internet for the last, you know, 30 years has been ads and subscriptions, problem is agents don’t click on ads. And buying one subscription and then having agents be able to basically pick all of the content back up from that, that’s not going to help make sure that the people who are creating that content get compensated.”
That argument sits at the center of Cloudflare’s push into “pay for crawl,” x402 and stablecoin-based payments. Prince said the HTTP 402 “payment required” response code has existed for years, but the missing piece has been a payment rail cheap and fast enough to handle fractions of a cent at enormous volume. Visa-style card infrastructure, he argued, cannot support that model because transaction fees make tiny payments uneconomic.
Cloudflare’s scale makes the requirement unusually stark. Prince said the company handles about 500 million requests per second. It estimates that 1% to 10% of those requests could be monetizable, implying roughly 5 million to 50 million paid requests per second if the model took off across its network. That is why Prince said even systems claiming 2 million transactions per second are still below Cloudflare’s likely needs.
“What we’ve struggled with is people will say to us, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re so excited. We can handle 2 million transactions per second.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s awesome. Good job.’ But I think day one I need 10 million transactions per second,” Prince said. He later sharpened the challenge: “So if you want to go build like a layer 1 blockchain that can support 100 million transactions per second, call us.”
For crypto, the comments amount to both validation and a technical indictment. Prince is not describing stablecoins as a marginal payment feature, but as infrastructure for an agentic web where bots pay for access in the background. At the same time, he said he does not yet see a blockchain ecosystem capable of handling the throughput Cloudflare would need if it switched the system on at scale.
The proposed end state is not simply paywalls for AI. Prince described a model where humans could still access content freely, while automated agents pay publishers and infrastructure providers through embedded microtransactions. Bankless summarized the idea as “humans get content for free and the robots pay a ton,” a line Prince endorsed as close to the objective.
Cloudflare’s role, in his telling, is coordination. The company sits in front of a large share of the web, counts many AI firms as customers and already gives site operators tools to control crawler access. Prince said the aim is to let publishers decide whether they want AI systems to consume their content freely, block them, or charge for access.
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $2.55 trillion.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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