# Cloudflare CEO says AI micropayments need 10 million transactions per second > Source: > Published: 2026-10-09 01:38:56+00:00 HaeB / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) # Cloudflare CEO says AI micropayments need 10 million transactions per second Matthew Prince argues AI agents are breaking the ad-funded web, and only stablecoin rails can handle the payment volume needed to fix it Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has put a number on the problem AI is creating for the open web. The number is very large. Speaking on the Bankless podcast on May 25, 2026, Prince said any micropayment system built for AI agents would need to process **10 million transactions per second on day one**. Over time, he said, that could scale toward 100 million TPS as bot traffic keeps growing. For context, [Visa](https://cryptobriefing.com/markets/visa/) handles around 18,000 TPS. Prince is describing a payment network hundreds of times bigger than one of the largest card networks on Earth, built for purchases worth fractions of a cent. ## The math behind the warning Prince’s argument starts with a simple observation. AI agents are scraping and consuming web content at a scale the internet was never designed for. Prince warned that this shift could severely disrupt the ad-funded model that keeps publishers alive. If the readers are machines, the business model built around human eyeballs starts to wobble. His fix is to let AI agents pay for what they consume, directly and automatically. That is where the throughput figures come in. Cloudflare already handles approximately 500 million requests per second across its network. Prince estimated that somewhere between 1% and 10% of that traffic could potentially be monetizable. Run those numbers and a mature payment system would need to clear between 5 million and 50 million transactions every second. The 10 million TPS launch figure sits comfortably inside that range, which explains why Prince treats it as a floor rather than an aspiration. ## Enter x402 and the Monetization Gateway Cloudflare is not just diagnosing the problem. It has been building a response alongside [Coinbase](https://cryptobriefing.com/markets/coinbase/). The centerpiece is the x402 protocol. It repurposes HTTP status code 402, “Payment Required,” for micropayments. ### AI, tech, and the markets they move—in one daily briefing. Daily. Free. Join 34,000+ readers across crypto, finance, and policy. The 402 code has existed in the HTTP standard for decades, reserved for future use in digital payments. That future mostly never arrived, and the code sat unused while 404 became a meme. x402 gives it a job. When an AI agent requests a page, API, dataset, or tool behind a paywall, the server can respond with a payment request. The agent pays and gets access, with no human typing in card details. Payments under x402 settle on-chain in under a second and cost fractions of a cent. The system uses stablecoins, which offer near-instant settlement and minimal fees. Cloudflare folded x402 into its Monetization Gateway, which rolled out in beta on September 30, 2026. The gateway lets AI agents automatically pay for web pages, APIs, datasets, and tools. Prince has been blunt about why the company went with stablecoins instead of conventional payment infrastructure. In his view, legacy financial systems simply are not equipped to handle this kind of payment model. Card transactions typically carry fixed fees that make sub-cent purchases pointless. Charging a bot a tiny fraction of a cent to read an article only works if the fee to process that charge is even smaller. ## Why the bot traffic timeline matters AI bot traffic is expected to surpass human traffic by mid-2027. By some metrics, it may have already done so. That turns a theoretical publisher problem into a practical one. If most visitors to a website are agents that never see an ad, the site’s revenue tracks a shrinking slice of its actual audience. Cloudflare sits in an unusual spot in this fight. Because so much of the web routes through its network, it sees bot traffic patterns at a scale few other companies can match. ## What this means for crypto and the open web For the crypto industry, Prince’s comments amount to a demand forecast with a very specific spec sheet. Whatever infrastructure wins this market needs to handle millions of payments per second, settle almost instantly, and cost close to nothing per transaction. Stablecoins look like the natural settlement asset here. Agents need predictable pricing, and Cloudflare’s choice of stablecoins for the Monetization Gateway reflects that logic. The Coinbase partnership also matters. Pairing a major internet infrastructure provider with a major crypto exchange gives x402 a distribution advantage that most payment protocols would envy. It plugs crypto rails directly into the traffic layer instead of asking websites to bolt on a wallet. Still, there are real questions. A beta launch is not the same as clearing tens of millions of transactions per second in production. The gap between today’s on-chain capacity and Prince’s 100 million TPS horizon is enormous. Publishers also need to opt in, and AI companies need to agree to pay. A payment request is only useful if the agent on the other end is willing to honor it. Adoption on both sides of the transaction will determine whether x402 becomes a standard or a footnote. For investors and builders, the signals to watch are adoption rates for x402 and the Monetization Gateway, and actual transaction volumes as the beta matures. **Disclosure:** This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our [Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).