Coinbase or Stripe? The Gatekeeper’s Decisive Vote

By David Christopher

Translated by Saoirse, Foresight News

The debate between x402 and MPP is a misdirection. The real question is: Who will Cloudflare choose to issue the NET Dollar stablecoin?

Recently, Stripe launched the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP) as the flagship product for Tempo’s mainnet launch.

A quick introduction: Tempo is an EVM-based public blockchain dedicated to payments, built by former Paradigm employees and ex-Ethereum core developers. MPP is an open, HTTP-based protocol for payments between agents and machines. It revives the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code (“Payment Required”)—similar to x402 in purpose but differing fundamentally in architectural philosophy.

The core trade-off between the two protocols is straightforward: x402 prioritizes openness; MPP enables better integration with existing payment infrastructure—but at the cost of tight coupling to the Stripe ecosystem.

Rather than continuing to debate these technical details, let’s shift focus to a more consequential dimension. At this stage, arguing over which protocol is technically superior—MPP or x402—is largely irrelevant. Beneath the surface lies a far more critical and influential contest: Coinbase and Stripe are vying for a partnership with Cloudflare, a major third-party infrastructure provider—and Cloudflare’s choice will heavily influence which standard becomes dominant across the industry.

Crawlers Have Broken the Old Model

Before diving deeper, let’s restate the core problem that agent payments aim to solve: AI agents have made web scraping trivial.

From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia’s traffic surged 50% due to crawlers, straining servers and driving up costs. At least 65% of its high-resource requests came from bots. In February 2025, image website DiscoverLife was bombarded with millions of crawler requests daily, nearly bringing it down. In August, cloud provider Fastly reported bots hitting a single website at a rate of 39,000 requests per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) faced similar issues, calling the surge “functionally equivalent to a denial-of-service attack.” On one day in November, its traffic spiked 968% year-on-year.

Although websites deploy robots.txt rules (to instruct crawlers on what they may or may not access), over 13% of crawlers simply ignore them. They overwhelm servers and place immense pressure on donation-dependent sites.

Commercial sites haven’t been spared either: Reddit tightened its request-rate limits; eight of the world’s top ten news sites now block training-focused bots; overall, 71% of leading content platforms fully block search-engine-style crawlers.

Daily website request volume trend for AI bots

Yet the internet isn’t shutting down entirely. Websites offering high-value, time-sensitive data—such as pricing, hotel bookings, or specialized datasets—are beginning to charge for access. Meanwhile, low-value, generic content remains freely crawlable via caches and proxies. Crawlers won’t disappear—but the internet is splitting into free and paid tiers. This is precisely why x402 and MPP emerged.

As Serpin, founder of Ethos Network, put it: “This crawling trend means the internet will change: more closed websites, more human verification, and greater separation between human and machine traffic.”

Cloudflare Is at a Pivotal Juncture

Cloudflare sits between websites and their visitors—protecting against attacks, accelerating load times, and handling massive traffic volumes. Roughly 20% of all websites globally rely on it, making it one of the internet’s most critical infrastructure hubs. Any decision Cloudflare makes regarding traffic policy affects one-fifth of the entire internet.

That also means Cloudflare feels the surge in bot traffic—and the resulting strain—more acutely than most, and is actively responding.

Initially, it offered websites a blanket option to block all bots. Last year, Cloudflare rolled out “Pay-per-Crawl”: instead of outright blocking bots, websites can charge AI crawlers small fees. When a bot accesses a page, it must either pay for access or receive an HTTP 402 (“Payment Required”) response. Cloudflare handles the billing. This represents a middle ground between full blockage and full openness.

After launching Pay-per-Crawl in July, Cloudflare partnered with Coinbase in September to form the x402 Foundation. Days later, they announced NET Dollar—a stablecoin designed specifically for agent payments.

In other words: Cloudflare is building both walls (blocking) and windows (paid access). It decides who gets locked out, who gets in—and under what terms. That position makes its next move critically important.

NET Dollar Is the Real Signal

When Cloudflare announced NET Dollar, it did not name the issuing entity. Even though Coinbase publicly launched its enterprise-custom stablecoin issuance service in December, Cloudflare still hasn’t officially named its partner.

This week, a report from The Information clarified the situation further: Cloudflare has yet to decide who will issue NET Dollar. Coinbase, ZeroHash, and others are competing for the role—leaving room for others, such as Stripe, to enter the race.

More notably: Immediately after Stripe launched MPP on Wednesday, Cloudflare rolled out an MPP-compatible proxy. This isn’t surprising—MPP supports x402 payments, so the two standards aren’t mutually exclusive. But the key point is: Cloudflare still hasn’t selected a stablecoin issuer, and even Coinbase—the very partner that co-founded the x402 Foundation with Cloudflare—remains just one bidder among several.

Why does this matter? Because NET Dollar will become the default currency for Cloudflare’s Pay-per-Crawl system and other paid-access services. Whoever issues it will see their associated payment standard prioritized within Cloudflare’s ecosystem.

• If Coinbase issues NET Dollar → Cloudflare will continue building around x402
• If Stripe issues it → MPP will gain massive momentum

Given that Cloudflare serves one-fifth of the global web—and is actively constructing a dual-layer system of “block + pay” for bot traffic—its decision will directly determine which protocol becomes mainstream across the internet.

Debating whether x402 or MPP is technically better pales in importance compared to tracking whom Cloudflare ultimately chooses to partner with. That is the true crux of the matter.