Cloudflare has opened a waitlist for its Monetization Gateway, which will let customers charge for any resource sitting behind Cloudflare’s network, whether web pages, datasets, APIs or AI MCP tools. At launch, payments will settle in stablecoins over x402, the payment protocol founded by Coinbase.
The x402 protocol revives the long dormant HTTP “Payment Required” response code. When a client requests a payment gated resource, the server responds with the price and payment instructions. The client pays and repeats the request with proof of payment attached. Because settlement is peer to peer in stablecoins, sub cent transactions become viable, whereas card fees would exceed the payment itself. Cloudflare is targeting sub second settlement, with verification enforced at the edge of its network spanning more than 330 cities, protecting the customer’s server from payment traffic.
Customers will set their own payment rules in the Cloudflare dashboard, deciding which traffic has to pay and how much. Examples include charging $0.01 per request to a premium data feed, or variable pricing for tasks that consume more computing power. Cloudflare argues the model suits AI agents, which consume content once rather than viewing ads or maintaining subscriptions. It says AI crawlers already request content between a hundred and tens of thousands of times for every visitor they refer back.
The Gateway builds on last year’s Pay Per Crawl, which let publishers charge AI crawlers for content, and follows AWS, which launched agentic stablecoin payments with Coinbase and Stripe in May. In April, Coinbase contributed x402 to the Linux Foundation, which now hosts the x402 Foundation.
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