Cloudflare is making a decision that could reshape the internet's payment landscape: choosing the issuer for its NET Dollar stablecoin. The winner of this partnership will heavily influence which AI agent payment protocol becomes the industry standard.
The x402 vs. MPP Battle: Ecosystem Stakes Behind Technical Differences
Stripe recently launched MPP (Machine Payment Protocol) as the flagship product of its Tempo mainnet. Tempo is an EVM-compatible public chain focused on payments, built by former Paradigm employees and ex-Ethereum core developers. MPP is an HTTP-based open protocol for AI-to-machine payments, reviving the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code (Payment Required). It shares similarities with x402 but differs in architecture: x402 prioritizes openness, while MPP integrates better with existing payment systems at the cost of being locked into Stripe's ecosystem.
Yet debating technical merits alone misses the point. The real game beneath the surface is that Coinbase and Stripe are vying for a partnership with third-party giant Cloudflare. Cloudflare's choice will directly decide which protocol gains mainstream adoption.
Crawlers Destroy the Old Model, Internet Fractures into Paid Content
From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia traffic surged 50% due to crawlers, driving server costs through the roof. At least 65% of high-consumption requests came from bots. In February 2025, image site DiscoverLife was bombarded with millions of crawler requests daily, nearly collapsing. In August, cloud provider Fastly recorded bots hitting a site at 39,000 requests per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) faced similar attacks, describing them as "functionally equivalent to a denial-of-service attack." On a single day in November, its traffic jumped 968% year-over-year. Despite robots.txt rules, over 13% of crawlers ignore them entirely.
Commercial sites are not immune: Reddit tightened rate limits; eight of the top ten global news sites now block training bots; 71% of leading content platforms completely shield crawling bots. But the internet isn't fully walled off. Sites offering high-value, time-sensitive data began charging for access, while low-value content remains freely crawlable via caches and proxies. The internet is splitting into free and paid tiers, giving rise to x402 and MPP.
Cloudflare's Pivotal Position: Serving One-Fifth of the Web
Cloudflare sits between websites and visitors, providing DDoS protection, speed optimization, and massive traffic handling. About 20% of global websites use its services. Any policy change Cloudflare makes ripples across one-fifth of the internet. Initially it offered blanket bot blocking; last year it introduced a "pay-per-crawl" plan. After launching in July 2025, Cloudflare co-founded the x402 Foundation with Coinbase in September. Days later, they announced NET Dollar, a stablecoin for AI agent payments.
However, Cloudflare did not disclose the issuer at launch. A recent The Information report revealed that the issuer remains undecided, with Coinbase, ZeroHash, and others competing. Notably, on the Wednesday of MPP's launch week, Cloudflare quickly released an MPP-compatible agent. Coinbase, once its x402 co-founder, is now just one of many bidders.
There are only two outcomes: if Coinbase secures the NET Dollar issuance, Cloudflare will deepen its commitment to x402; if Stripe wins, MPP gains enormous ecosystem momentum. Given Cloudflare's coverage of one-fifth of the web, this single decision will determine which protocol becomes the internet's payment standard.