Cloudflare opens waitlist for stablecoin payment gateway

Cloudflare, one of the largest internet infrastructure companies in the world, opens the waitlist for its new Monetization Gateway. With this product, developers can place web pages, datasets, APIs and MCP tools behind a paywall and have them paid for directly in stablecoins. Payments go through the open x402 protocol.

How the Monetization Gateway works

The operation is relatively simple. An AI agent or other buyer makes a request to the Cloudflare Monetization Gateway. The gateway responds with an x402 status code and the corresponding price. The buyer then sends the request again, this time with a payment authorisation from their own wallet. The gateway receives the proof of payment and gives the buyer access to the requested resource.

The x402 protocol is an open standard specially designed for this type of machine-to-machine transactions. Because Cloudflare supports this protocol, AI agents can also pay for access to digital resources entirely independently, without human intervention.

Stablecoins as a payment method for the web

The choice of stablecoins as a payment method fits a broader trend in which large tech companies and financial institutions are taking stablecoins increasingly seriously. Previously, Visa, BlackRock and Coinbase already supported a new stablecoin, and there is also a lot of movement around existing stablecoins such as USDC, such as when the CEO of Circle defended USDC against a new alternative.

With the Monetization Gateway, Cloudflare makes stablecoin payments accessible to an enormously wide audience of developers. The company positions the product as a low-barrier way to monetise any digital service or dataset, without the involvement of traditional payment systems or intermediaries. Anyone who wants to use the new gateway can now sign up for the waitlist.