Melker Bengtsson
TL;DR:
- Cloudflare Wallets lets AI agents make autonomous purchases of APIs, data and content with human guardrails set in advance
- Humans fund the account and set an allowance, a pre-approved merchant list and a maximum transaction size
- Settlement runs on x402, developed by Coinbase; Base and Solana are today's most popular chains for x402 transactions
- The wallet doubles as agent identity, letting merchants stop agents from spinning up free trials and credits
Cloudflare, the web infrastructure giant that powers around 20% of global internet traffic, just announced Cloudflare Wallets. Wallets is a stablecoin wallet built for AI agents. They will allow agents to make autonomous purchases of stuff like APIs, data and content but with human guardrails that are set in advance.
Settlement will run on the new x402 protocol. x402 is a protocol developed by Coinbase and is supported by some of the largest payments, crypto and AI companies in the world and it allows micropayments directly in web requests. This is just the latest news that shows that crypto and stablecoins are becoming the native money layer of the internet.
Guardrails Solve the Agent Spending Problem
With the guardrails, Wallets solves an issue that many have had with letting agents spend money: it spends too much and on stuff it doesn’t really need. Humans will fund the account and then set up the guardrails to give the agent an allowance, a pre-approved merchant list and a maximum transaction size. Will Papper, Cloudflare's product manager for Agent Payments said:
These limits may seem like constraints, but counterintuitively they give agents more freedom. If an agent is responsible for $10, you can worry less about its spending than if it is responsible for $1,000.
The wallets will have onramps and offramps in supported regions, as well as self-funding directly with stablecoins.
While the blog post doesn’t mention which chains will be supported, the documentation for their x402 Agents SDK lists Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Solana, Aptos, Stellar, and Sui. Today Base and Solana are the most popular choices for x402 transactions even if volume is still low. Coinbase reported in April that x402 transactions had reached $50 million over 165 million transactions.
The Wallet Doubles as Agent Identity
What’s also announced in the blog post, if a bit buried, is that the wallet doubles as agent identity. Agent traffic today has no identity, which means that a single agent can just spin up a new free trial at a SaaS or a new account to get credits. With identity, merchants will be able to stop this behaviour. Of course, identifying and requiring identity will be optional, both ways.
The race for agentic payments has two options. Either cards would be retrofitted to work well for machines or we’d use crypto. At the moment, crypto seems set to become the default payment rails for agents.
