Internet and cloud services major Cloudflare has become the latest entrant into the agentic AI space aiming to support autonomous agentic commerce. The San Francisco-based company on Tuesday debuted its AI wallet service dubbed “cloudflare.pay”. The company has integrated Coinbase’s AI-to-AI payment mechanism called the x402 Protocol to support these agentic microtransactions.
“At Cloudflare, we want to offer all the building blocks for agentic commerce to succeed. All of these building blocks will create a headless marketplace for the Internet,” the company said in its announcement.
Cloudflare’s wallet plan #
With its wallet service, Cloudflare wishes to enable its users pay for APIs and content via stablecoins like USDT and USDC. The company’s wallet service brings two options to the table — Account Wallets and Virtual Wallets.
Account Wallets will be fully human controlled wallets that will act as a master bank account for AI agents. From here, humans will be able to fund, manage, and limit the spending budgets allocated to their AI agents, retaining solid control over agentic activities.
Virtual Wallets, on the other hand, will be controlled by agents as sub-accounts. Through these, agents will be able to initiate autonomous purchases using developer API keys. While agents will get the liberty of acting independently using these wallets, their humans will retain the authority to cap spending limits.
Source: Cloudflare
Humans controlling these wallets will be allowed to choose and share their Cloudflare Wallet handles linking their agents to a stable identity while interacting with merchants.
The company said it will be using simple routes to fund the wallets.
“We will start with simple ways to onramp and offramp funds within supported geographies, with self-funding via stablecoins available as an alternative for eligible users,” the announcement noted.
Optional agentic identification support #
As a service, Cloudflare.pay will essentially allocate each AI agent on its network with a verified digital passport.
It would link the agents to the real human or entity operating it. This will solve the issue that merchants face today, not knowing who owns an agent seeking a transactional permission.
While identifying themselves is optional for the AI, the service will allow merchants to trust who they are dealing with and offer better pricing and terms to verified agents. “We are proposing a human-readable identifier for a not-very-readable keypair, similar to the URL and IP-address pairings used in DNS. We only want to make identity simple to remember and easy to declare,” Cloudflare added.
Wallet owners will be able to choose human readable name tags like “research.example.cloudflare.pay” to give their agents a clear identification.
Source: Cloudflare.pay
Companies like Circle and Stripe have also recently launched their own AI-to-AI payment services to push agents into the commerce and investment sectors.