What happened
Cloudflare announced the Monetization Gateway, a tool that charges AI agents in USDC each time they access an online service, now in closed beta for eligible U.S.-based buyers and sellers. It builds on August's cloudflare.pay.
Why it matters
The tool lets an agent pay a small fee automatically, so no human needs to sign up for a monthly subscription or enter a credit card number, and it uses Coinbase's x402 system to verify payments.
What to watch
The closed beta is limited to eligible U.S.-based buyers and sellers, so wider impact hinges on how fast Cloudflare ramps up features and users through the rest of the year.
WHO IT HITSBusinesses that sell online services or content and currently rely on subscriptions or card payments may need to decide whether to accept agent payments via stablecoins; Cloudflare's tool is in closed beta for eligible U.S.-based buyers and sellers.
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Cloudflare's new tool arrives as part of a broader push to build a payment system for AI agents. The Monetization Gateway follows an August rollout of cloudflare.pay, which lets AI agents prove they are acting on a user's behalf and spend from a linked wallet. The company says it will ramp up features and users through the rest of the year, with plans to be widely available by early 2027.
The idea of agentic commerce—using AI agents to search for products, make purchases, and handle payments—has gained momentum over the past year, and many are touting stablecoins as a natural option for those payments. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, in a roughly 18,000-word essay published in July titled "The Agentic Economy," envisioned a future in which AI agents increasingly carry out transactions using stablecoins as programmable money. Behind Cloudflare's tool, Coinbase's x402 system verifies payments, and USDC transactions are settled on Base.
Other crypto and payments companies have rolled out similar products: MoonPay integrated its AI-enabled payment and wallet tool into Grok, Robinhood said customers could use AI agents to make purchases on their behalf with the Robinhood Gold credit card, and Circle, Stripe, and Tempo have announced tools for AI agents to hold funds or make payments. Visa and Mastercard also unveiled tools in April 2025. Whether Cloudflare's approach becomes widely used may depend on adoption by U.S.-based buyers and sellers in the closed beta and on the planned ramp-up through the rest of the year.
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