Melker Bengtsson
TL;DR
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Cloudflare opened the waitlist for its Monetization Gateway, letting publishers charge for access to any page, API, dataset or tool
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Payments settle in stablecoins using x402, a Coinbase-developed protocol reviving HTTP's old 402 "Payment Required" code from 1997
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AWS launched x402 support on CloudFront two weeks earlier, making two major infrastructure companies in a short time
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AI training traffic now accounts for 52% of crawler requests on Cloudflare, yet crawlers don't watch ads or buy subscriptions
Last week, Cloudflare opened the waitlist for their Monetization Gateway. The gateway is a way for publishers and developers to charge for access to any page, API, dataset or tool that they host. The payments are settled in stablecoin using a new protocol called x402. x402 was developed by Coinbase and uses USDC on BASE as its default chain but supports both Ethereum and Solana.
The news comes just two weeks after Amazon Web Services announced that they’ve launched support for x402 on their CDN service CloudFront. That makes two major infrastructure companies in a short time. AWS’s solution is already live, while Cloudflare is still just a waitlist, they’ve yet to announce a price or a release date.
The driver behind this infrastructure is that AI training traffic now accounts for 52% of crawler requests on the Cloudflare platform. Meanwhile, the crawlers don’t watch ads or sign up for subscriptions so publishers are essentially providing their information for free.
A Protocol Designed to Interact With Machines
The protocol, x402, is only designed to interact with machines. For example, an AI agent requesting to read a website which has a payment rule will get a machine readable price for entering. Settlement will land in under a second via stablecoins and the information will then be presented to the agent.
x402 is a revival of HTTP’s old 402 code “Payment Required” from 1997 that never got any traction. The technology has gained good traction since it was first developed by Coinbase. It’s now been moved to the Linux Foundation, where it will continue its development. Members of the initiative include payment and technology giants such as Visa, Mastercard, Google and Microsoft.
Since this is new technology, some things are yet to be seen, like how is the European Union going to handle the invoicing and how is VAT going to be handled. But, with this protocol seemingly gaining traction, stablecoins will move even more into regular life, becoming an important business decision for publishers online.
