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.
> If you define instant as less than half a second then Solana, Avalanche, and various L2s are instant
I suppose. I don’t see why Cloudflare would want to give up that sort of control. The advantage they bring to the table is they’re a trusted brand per se.
Since most existing blockchains are open source they can just create their own Flarechain™ based on existing code. This would give them de facto control but also the appearance of decentralization at the same time. My point is that it's technologically possible.
L2 are by design a centralized crutch to "fix" slow L1. They usually work like "oh, let's do all transactions virtually on a side, managed by some centralized pseudo-bank, and then only write sum total on L1". Lightning works like that, likely others too. I don't understand how tokenbros ignore this issue, a least people who claim that tokens are currency replacement.
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.
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.
"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?
Ah, I see their end goal here. You can either use a full browser to download data from websites (which is what most people will still do), but they provide a temptation to just pay CloudFlare to bypass their Turnstile (which corporations might go for, then they'll probably try to expand this to the average person too).
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.
It doesn't have to be "bullshit", in the sense that it can be working tech. The question is - who will use it, and why? Being such a large company and major player in the space why don't they have launch partners lined up and ready to go?
> 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.
Cloudflare's plan does assume that AI crawlers and deep research agents can tell quality content from slop before they pay for it. If the AIs just pay for anything I agree with you.
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.
“Stablecoins could be issued by banks and credit unions (through subsidiaries) or nonbanks. Nonbanks would be restricted to financial firms unless the Treasury Secretary and chairs of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)—referred to as the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee (SCRC)—unanimously find they do not pose risks to the banking or financial system and will comply with certain requirements.”
> basket of currencies and value stores seems like it would be the least volatile
For whom? The least volatile asset relative to dollars are dollars. The moment you start building a money-market fund you have novel risks, from credit to rates and FX. (And, in the extreme, legal.)
They’re better off with their own currency or an international currency (currently, Euros or dollars). Almost never a basket. (The IMF has SDRs. And various trade-weighted baskets are constructed for metric purposes. They aren’t practical instruments.)
> Is US dollar backed a good thing? At this point we should be backing things on gold, platinum.
It's about making free money, not about making sense.
They back it with USD because recent US regulations allow stablecoins to be backed by US securities. They will buy these securities, and for every dollar converted into their coin, they will earn a percentage per year. Free money.
> Australian dollar has gone up about 20% vs the American dollar since Trump
Which makes it garbage for transacting if you’re paid in or pay with any other currency.
Modern currencies split their store of value and medium of exchange components. Stablecoins (and credit cards and checking accounts) seize on the latter. Bitcoins (and Treasuries and money-market funds) the former.
I mean.. That's factually not true, it's lost tons of value, it's currently 1.53, what are you talking about? You're either very confused Or just a straight up liar.
this coinslop means less bankslop which is actually an improvement, they're undoubtedly baking their "dollar" with tbills and they get to make 4 percent on every dollar transacted with no counterparty risk besides the full faith and credit of the US Government.
yay for coinslop! transparent usage of currency by robots... no way is it better than a bunch of rolled up swift transfers/wires.....
coinslop not routed through the bankslop rail is still an improvement.
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.
But I am sure this will really be the crypto coin to power the internet’s transactions. All the previous ones got it wrong
50% of Web traffic doesn't flow through Coinbase or Tether; it goes through Cloudflare. So yeah, they have a much greater chance of successfully erecting a tollbooth. And just like you pay US taxes in US dollars you'll pay Cloudflare tax in Cloudflare dollars.
> 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
Hard nope from me post Trump. We don’t need the President having potentially unregulated and direct visibility into and access to every American’s bank account.
(And no, it’s not currently the case. The FBI still has to e.g. request records, a process which creates friction and the potential for pushback or whistleblowing.)
I hear you on Trump but note that POTUS has full access to the IRS records. Except he doesn’t and that is an official executive branch agency, unlike the Fed. Besides, ideally you’d be able to get a foreign central bank account too.
I mean don’t open an account in China? And this doesn’t preclude private banking. You can pay a private bank to manage your money, just that you also have a public option.
I don’t really want to go down a full political rabbit hole but Trump can ask for whatever he wants. If you look at all the cases in the federal courts currently they all are basically figuring out just how much of what he has tried is actually legal and mostly finding that very little of it is. As a result you’ll see headlines like “Trump requests JumpCrisscross’s medical records and bank statements” on the front page of CNN but you won’t see the headline on page six that reads “Trump appointed judge laughed the FBI’s lawyers out of the court room for making a stupid request.”
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.
The product page [1] is the most vaporware-y that I’ve seen in a while.
That said, they’re emphasising speed. (“Instant.”)
That seems to preclude using a major, public blockchain. (On the other hand, they don’t talk up privacy.)
[1] https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/
If you define instant as less than half a second then Solana, Avalanche, and various L2s are instant.
> If you define instant as less than half a second then Solana, Avalanche, and various L2s are instant
I suppose. I don’t see why Cloudflare would want to give up that sort of control. The advantage they bring to the table is they’re a trusted brand per se.
Since most existing blockchains are open source they can just create their own Flarechain™ based on existing code. This would give them de facto control but also the appearance of decentralization at the same time. My point is that it's technologically possible.
> My point is that it's technologically possible
Oh totally, that’s why I qualified blockchain with major and public.
L2 are by design a centralized crutch to "fix" slow L1. They usually work like "oh, let's do all transactions virtually on a side, managed by some centralized pseudo-bank, and then only write sum total on L1". Lightning works like that, likely others too. I don't understand how tokenbros ignore this issue, a least people who claim that tokens are currency replacement.
Blockchain is not hype anymore, I bet they talk about AI or LLMs.
Edit: I was not wrong.
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.
I actually had to double check it wasn't April 1st.
402 Payment Required will be a thing we see very often soon.
Same thing. Like I really going to let agents screw with my money
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.
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?
> Does the workflow involve sending messages to agents or making HTTP requests?
It looks like it will be an API for agents [1].
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...
Ah, I see their end goal here. You can either use a full browser to download data from websites (which is what most people will still do), but they provide a temptation to just pay CloudFlare to bypass their Turnstile (which corporations might go for, then they'll probably try to expand this to the average person too).
Basically, "pay to bypass our CAPTCHA!".
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.
Does Cloudflare have a history of bullshit announcements? (Serious question.)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tv-as-a-service/
Idk what this is
It doesn't have to be "bullshit", in the sense that it can be working tech. The question is - who will use it, and why? Being such a large company and major player in the space why don't they have launch partners lined up and ready to go?
The name "NET Dollar" matches their ticker symbol, "NET".
Cloudflare had a busy birthday week.
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?
People are trying to separate search crawling from AI crawling but Google is strongly resisting. I don't know how it will play out.
> 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.
Cloudflare's plan does assume that AI crawlers and deep research agents can tell quality content from slop before they pay for it. If the AIs just pay for anything I agree with you.
They want to reinvent flattr but this time on the blockchain.
So Cloudflare is establishing themselves as the toll station for the internet.
What proportion of websites do they need to gatekeep before the label applies?
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.)
> Anyone know whether they already have approval
No indication they have.
“Stablecoins could be issued by banks and credit unions (through subsidiaries) or nonbanks. Nonbanks would be restricted to financial firms unless the Treasury Secretary and chairs of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)—referred to as the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee (SCRC)—unanimously find they do not pose risks to the banking or financial system and will comply with certain requirements.”
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12553
Stablecoins are already a thing. Hundreds of them are circulating legally in the US. So I doubt this will need new approval.
I'm assuming the stablecoin market cap shows up on the balance sheet which is a nice way to goose the ratios.
It shows up as an asset and liability so they cancel out. They do get to keep the interest though.
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.
A basket of currencies and value stores seems like it would be the least volatile.
> basket of currencies and value stores seems like it would be the least volatile
For whom? The least volatile asset relative to dollars are dollars. The moment you start building a money-market fund you have novel risks, from credit to rates and FX. (And, in the extreme, legal.)
> For whom
For people outside of the US.
> For people outside of the US
They’re better off with their own currency or an international currency (currently, Euros or dollars). Almost never a basket. (The IMF has SDRs. And various trade-weighted baskets are constructed for metric purposes. They aren’t practical instruments.)
> Is US dollar backed a good thing? At this point we should be backing things on gold, platinum.
It's about making free money, not about making sense. They back it with USD because recent US regulations allow stablecoins to be backed by US securities. They will buy these securities, and for every dollar converted into their coin, they will earn a percentage per year. Free money.
> Australian dollar has gone up about 20% vs the American dollar since Trump
Which makes it garbage for transacting if you’re paid in or pay with any other currency.
Modern currencies split their store of value and medium of exchange components. Stablecoins (and credit cards and checking accounts) seize on the latter. Bitcoins (and Treasuries and money-market funds) the former.
I mean.. That's factually not true, it's lost tons of value, it's currently 1.53, what are you talking about? You're either very confused Or just a straight up liar.
If you don't hold it as an investment it doesn't matter.
This is the end of what we know as Internet isnt it?
They're calling it a New Internet Business Model https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-2025-annual-founders-... discussed the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599
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
I don't think there is any KYC for stablecoins.
There definitely is (to convert them to real money).
Yes, for on-ramp and off-ramp.
Which would be illegal since it's not compatible with various laws.
Circle (USDC/$CRCL) down [1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRCL/
Hooray! More coinslop!
this coinslop means less bankslop which is actually an improvement, they're undoubtedly baking their "dollar" with tbills and they get to make 4 percent on every dollar transacted with no counterparty risk besides the full faith and credit of the US Government.
> means less bankslop which is actually an improvement
Why is the standard tied directly a single for profit company an improvement to the system that isn't tied to any specific wntity and anyone can use?
Presumably because it's really super duper convenient for the single for-profit entity that possesses an outstanding majority of the minted coinage.
Woohoo! I freaking love coinslop!
yay for coinslop! transparent usage of currency by robots... no way is it better than a bunch of rolled up swift transfers/wires..... coinslop not routed through the bankslop rail is still an improvement.
> no way is it better than a bunch of rolled up swift transfers/wires
I non-sarcastically agree.
What's wrong with same day ACH?
The risk of having the money be not in a FDIC bank makes this a nonstarter.
[dead]
Now with AI!
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.
But I am sure this will really be the crypto coin to power the internet’s transactions. All the previous ones got it wrong
50% of Web traffic doesn't flow through Coinbase or Tether; it goes through Cloudflare. So yeah, they have a much greater chance of successfully erecting a tollbooth. And just like you pay US taxes in US dollars you'll pay Cloudflare tax in Cloudflare dollars.
> 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
Hard nope from me post Trump. We don’t need the President having potentially unregulated and direct visibility into and access to every American’s bank account.
(And no, it’s not currently the case. The FBI still has to e.g. request records, a process which creates friction and the potential for pushback or whistleblowing.)
I hear you on Trump but note that POTUS has full access to the IRS records. Except he doesn’t and that is an official executive branch agency, unlike the Fed. Besides, ideally you’d be able to get a foreign central bank account too.
> note that POTUS has full access to the IRS records. Except he doesn’t
He hasn’t asked for it. I strongly doubt if he can control the Fed and FTC that the IRS will somehow be a red line.
> ideally you’d be able to get a foreign central bank account too
Oh goodie, what I need in my life is the CCP being able to blackmail me.
I mean don’t open an account in China? And this doesn’t preclude private banking. You can pay a private bank to manage your money, just that you also have a public option.
I don’t really want to go down a full political rabbit hole but Trump can ask for whatever he wants. If you look at all the cases in the federal courts currently they all are basically figuring out just how much of what he has tried is actually legal and mostly finding that very little of it is. As a result you’ll see headlines like “Trump requests JumpCrisscross’s medical records and bank statements” on the front page of CNN but you won’t see the headline on page six that reads “Trump appointed judge laughed the FBI’s lawyers out of the court room for making a stupid request.”
Finally AI can buy flights for me! /s