On Aug. 8, ARK Invest research head Lorenzo Valente said the crypto community may have missed what he called the most important earnings call of the week: Cloudflare’s.
Valente said the market paid attention to Cloudflare wallet-related news, but the more important point was management’s read on how the rise of AI agents is changing internet infrastructure.
AI agent traffic has moved past half of total network traffic
According to Valente, Cloudflare currently carries about 20% of internet traffic. He cited company disclosures showing that AI agent requests were up 1700% year over year, and that AI agent traffic made up more than 50% of total network traffic in the quarter. He said this marked the first time in internet history that non-human traffic became the primary source of traffic.
Ad and subscription models may not fit agent-driven usage
Valente argued that AI agents will fundamentally change today’s internet business model. Traditional software models built around advertising and subscriptions do not translate well to agent access, he said, because AI agents do not consume ads the way human users do.
Instead, he said Cloudflare could eventually create a new internet value settlement layer by charging very small micropayments for legitimate AI agent requests.
Potential transaction volumes could exceed existing payment rails by orders of magnitude
Valente said Cloudflare currently processes about 500 million requests per second. The company expects 1% to 10% of that traffic to have commercial potential, implying transaction demand of roughly 10 million to 100 million TPS.
For comparison, he said Visa tops out at around 20,000 TPS, which would be insufficient for an AI agent economy at that scale. He added that if AI agent transactions were priced at $0.001 each, even 10 million TPS could produce about $315 billion in annual base transaction fees. At 100 million TPS, the addressable market would be larger still.
Stablecoins and crypto rails seen as candidate infrastructure
Valente concluded that shorting L1 throughput is effectively a bet against the growth of AI agent workflows. As the agent economy develops, he said, the settlement layer will need to operate several orders of magnitude above today’s financial payment networks, with stablecoins and crypto infrastructure positioned as key base-layer rails for agent finance.