They're calling this a stablecoin but AFAICT there's no direct mention of blockchains or decentralization or anything else along those lines, have we wrapped all the way around to using crypto nomenclature to talk about plain old centralized ledgers?

Not that I'd complain about one less pointless blockchain in the world, it's just funny.

Cloudflare had a busy birthday week.

You all need to stop being so pessimistic. This is a great idea.

Want PBS to stick around? Make it so anybody who's sticking on chat GPT gets great answers from PBS and every time ChatGPT scrapes it, PBS gets money.

Is it extremely difficult? Obviously. Will it work? Probably not, very few things do. Is it a great thing that some folks are doing it and trying to make it work so that we can have a functional media ecosystem in a post-social-media age? Absolutely.

Basically they will become the toll-lords of the internet. And because of that, THEY can choose what they accept as payment. A stablecoin (probably just run by them but technology coming from one of the stablecoin providers like Paxos) is perfect for this, as it will be regulated and akin to a digital dollar, with the addition that they can earn yield on treasury bills at the same time.

Pretty smart.

I actually had to double check it wasn't April 1st.

It's an interesting move from Cloudflare, and entirely rational from their point of view. They need to deal with a coming tidal wave of agentic bot traffic, and one expedient way to do this is erect a toll booth that forces agents to identify, whitelist, and/or pay for access.

I wrote up more detailed thoughts here: https://www.pberg.com/blog/2025/09/25/cloudflares-agentic-to...

"Rules, triggers, and workflows can be embedded directly into payments, making them smarter and adaptable." -- are they smart contracts? What kind of workflows? Does the workflow involve sending messages to agents or making HTTP requests?

I have found that grand announcements like these that aren't accompanied by "you can use this for <major use case> starting today" are likely not going to amount to much.

The name "NET Dollar" matches their ticker symbol, "NET".

I assume this is for people who don’t want their sites crawled and ingested for AI training. With the goal of making it cost-prohibitive to do so.

Of course, one side effect will be crippling search engines as well. Maybe less important for driving traffic in the social media era?

> The Internet’s next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions—tools that shift incentives toward original, creative content that actually adds value

I don't understand this. How is pay per use and paywalling content going to incentivize the creation of original content? If anything, people are more incentivized to create low quality, generic content because they're not directly accessible by humans.

So Cloudflare is establishing themselves as the toll station for the internet.

Dear whiners: the reason the internet sucks today is because this didn’t already exist. Do you know why Reddit did their horrible redesign and locked down their apps? It wasn’t because you didn’t complain loudly enough, it was because their shareholders were concerned about losing out on profits from data scraping AI companies. Do you know why Twitter can’t be read without logging in? It’s because their shareholders were concerned about losing out on profits from data scraping AI companies. Do you know why you don’t click Quora links? Because they don’t serve you useful results, because they’re concerned about losing profits from data scraping AI companies. Do you see the pattern here?

The open internet died a very long time ago. It’s been dead for years. It’s not coming back unless we figure out a way to make shareholders happy. Paying these companies for the content they host is how that happens.

Anyone know whether they already have approval of the current US executive administration? (Which might smooth the regulatory challenges.)

I'm assuming the stablecoin market cap shows up on the balance sheet which is a nice way to goose the ratios.

Make it stop

Is US dollar backed a good thing? At this point we should be backing things on gold, platinum.

The Australian dollar has gone up about 20% vs the American dollar since Trump.

This is the end of what we know as Internet isnt it?

Which chain, BASE?

Cloudflare is living that mid 00's Google vibe mixed with AWS mind..

No need to be totally cynic to kinda know how this will play out..

Crypto again? Wow, that's horrible..

But at least maybe that will rightfully discourage companies from using it.

https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/

This is only really interesting if you can use it with out KYC

Circle (USDC/$CRCL) down [1].

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRCL/

Hooray! More coinslop!

Holy buzzwords Batman.

But I am sure this will really be the crypto coin to power the internet’s transactions. All the previous ones got it wrong, this is the solution. /s

Instead of this, we need a central bank that can provide everyone with a direct account to stop all the banking speculation. That’s the instant transactions I want.

Finally AI can buy flights for me! /s