Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said during the Bankless podcast on May 25, 2026 that any micropayment system built for AI agents would need to process 10 million transactions per second on day one, scaling toward 100 million TPS as bot traffic grows. For context, Visa handles approximately 18,000 TPS, making Prince’s figures hundreds of times larger than one of the world’s largest card networks. Cloudflare has developed the x402 protocol in partnership with Coinbase, repurposing HTTP status code 402 for AI micropayments settled on-chain in stablecoins, integrated into its Monetization Gateway launched in beta on September 30, 2026. AI bot traffic is expected to surpass human traffic by mid-2027, turning a theoretical threat into a practical problem for publishers dependent on the advertising-funded model.
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