Cloudflare's Choice: Coinbase or Stripe

Written by: David Christopher

Translated by: Block unicorn

This week, Stripe and the Tempo mainnet launched MPP (Machine Payment Protocol) as its flagship version.

If you’re not familiar, Tempo is a payment-optimized Layer 1 EVM chain composed of former Paradigm employees and Ethereum core developers. MPP is an open protocol based on HTTP for proxying payments to machines. It reactivates the long-idle HTTP 402 status code, similar to x402, though with a different architectural concept.

The core trade-off between these two protocols is simple: x402 prioritizes openness, while MPP sacrifices some of Stripe’s ecosystem stickiness to offer better integration with existing payment channels.

Rather than delving into these subtle differences, let’s focus on another aspect. I believe that at this stage, debating the technical merits of MPP versus x402 is less meaningful. Beneath the surface, there’s a more interesting and influential dynamic: Coinbase and Stripe may be competing with a third, well-established company that has secured a strong position, and the support from this company could significantly influence which standard ultimately dominates.

Web Crawler Disruption Breaks Old Models

But before diving deeper, we must first reaffirm one of the core issues that proxy payments address: proxies make web crawling (the process of extracting data from websites) too easy.

From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia’s traffic increased by 50% due to this reason, overwhelming its servers and causing costs to soar. At least 65% of resource-intensive requests come from bots. In February 2025, bots sent millions of requests daily to the DiscoverLife image database, slowing the site to unusability. In August of the same year, cloud provider Fastly reported a bot attacking a website at 39,000 requests per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) reported similar impacts, describing this wave of web crawling as “functionally equivalent to a denial-of-service attack.” On a certain day in November 2025, traffic surged 968% compared to the same period the previous year.

Despite measures like adding robots.txt files—which essentially specify what content bots can access—over 13% of crawlers bypass these rules. They overload servers and pressure websites, many of which rely on donations. Commercial sites are no exception. Reddit tightened rate limits. Eight of the top ten news sites now block training bots. Across the broader internet, 71% of top publishers fully block crawling bots.

However, the internet isn’t entirely tightening restrictions. Sites offering expensive or time-sensitive data (such as prices, hotel bookings, or specialized datasets) have started charging for access. Daily or low-value content can still be freely scraped via caching or proxies. Web scraping hasn’t disappeared; it has split into free and paid forms. This is precisely why protocols like x402 and MPP are necessary.

As Serpin, founder of Ethos Network, pointed out this week: “This web crawling dynamic means the internet will change… websites will become more closed, requiring more manual verification, and user traffic and proxy traffic will become more isolated.”

Enter Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s Role as a Middleman

Cloudflare acts as a bridge between websites and visitors. It protects sites from attacks, speeds up loading times, and handles large-scale traffic. About 20% of websites use it, making it one of the most critical bottlenecks on the internet. Cloudflare’s decisions on traffic management impact one-fifth of internet users.

This also means Cloudflare can directly feel the surge in bot traffic and the pressure web crawling places on the public (and private) internet—they are building solutions to address this.

First, they introduced a feature allowing sites to block all bots. Then, last year, they launched a pay-per-crawl service, enabling sites to charge AI bots a tiny fee for crawling web pages instead of outright blocking them. When a bot visits a page, it either pays for access or receives a 402 “Payment Required” response containing the price info (sounds familiar?). Billing is handled by Cloudflare. This approach sits between “full blocking” and “free open access.”

The pay-per-crawl service launched in July. By September, Cloudflare partnered with Coinbase to launch the x402 Foundation. Days later, they released NET Dollar, a stablecoin for proxy payments.

In other words, Cloudflare is both building walls and opening windows. They provide tools to block access and tools for paid access. They decide what content is off-limits, what is accessible, and under what conditions. This stance makes their next move crucial.

NET Dollar Is the Real Signal

When Cloudflare announced NET Dollar, they did not specify the issuer.

Although their x402 Foundation partner Coinbase publicly launched an enterprise stablecoin issuance service last December, Cloudflare has yet to disclose the issuer.

Then, this week, Cloudflare’s stock price surged following a report by The Information, which clarified the ongoing dynamic we’ve been discussing. The report specifically noted that who will help Cloudflare launch NET Dollar remains unresolved, with “companies like Coinbase and ZeroHash” bidding. This wording also leaves room for others, such as Stripe.

Furthermore, after MPP was released last Wednesday, Cloudflare immediately launched an MPP proxy compatible with the standard. This isn’t surprising—MPP also supports x402 payments, so it’s not a completely independent standard. But they have not officially announced the stablecoin issuer, and the company that co-founded the x402 Foundation is just one of many bidders, raising questions.

This is important because: NET Dollar will be the default currency for pay-per-crawl and other Cloudflare paid services. Whichever entity issues the protocol, its standard will receive priority support within Cloudflare’s tech stack. If Coinbase issues NET Dollar, Cloudflare has reason to continue building infrastructure around x402. If Stripe issues it, MPP benefits. Given that Cloudflare manages one-fifth of internet traffic and is building infrastructure to intercept and profit from bot traffic, this priority will determine the default protocol for a significant part of the internet.

Compared to the rivalry between x402 and MPP, who Cloudflare partners with to co-develop is truly more important. That’s the real issue.