Author: David Christopher
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
This week, Stripe launched its flagship product, MPP (Machine Payment Protocol), alongside the Tempo mainnet launch.
If you didn’t know, Tempo is an L1 EVM chain built by former Paradigm employees and former Ethereum core developers, optimized for payments. MPP is an open agent-to-machine payment protocol based on HTTP that revives the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code, similar to x402, though their architectural philosophies differ.
Tempo Mainnet: The Agent Economy Battle on Bankless
The core trade-off between these two protocols is straightforward: x402 prioritizes openness, while MPP offers superior integration with existing payment rails at the cost of being tied to the Stripe ecosystem.
Instead of further debating these nuances, let’s shift our focus to another dimension. I believe arguing over the technical merits of MPP versus x402 is not particularly valuable at this stage. Beneath the surface, a more interesting and impactful dynamic is at play: Coinbase and Stripe may be competing to form partnerships with a third powerful and established player, whose support could significantly influence which standard becomes dominant.
AI web crawlers are overwhelming the web
But first, before diving in, let’s restate one of the core problems agent payments aim to solve: agents make data scraping—the process of extracting data from websites—too easy.
From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia's traffic surged by 50%, overwhelming its servers and causing operational costs to skyrocket. At least 65% of its most resource-intensive requests came from bots. In February 2025, bots bombarded the image library DiscoverLife with millions of requests daily, slowing the site to near unusability. In August, cloud service provider Fastly reported a case in which a bot launched a fierce attack on a website at a rate of 39,000 requests per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) also reported similar impacts, describing this wave of scraping as "functionally equivalent to a denial-of-service attack." On a single day in November 2025, their traffic spiked by 968% compared to the previous year.
Although measures such as adding a robots.txt file—which essentially defines where robots can and cannot access on a website—have been implemented, over 13% of crawlers ignore these rules. They overload servers and place strain on websites, many of which rely on donations. But commercial websites have not been spared either: Reddit has tightened rate limits, and 8 of the top 10 news websites currently block training bots. Across the broader web, 71% of top publishers have completely blocked retrieval bots.
However, the web has not been uniformly blocked. Websites offering expensive or time-sensitive data—such as prices, hotel bookings, or professional datasets—are beginning to charge for access. Daily or low-value content can still be freely scraped via caching or proxies. Web scraping has not disappeared; it has instead split into free and paid categories. This is precisely why x402 and MPP have become necessary.
As Ethos Network founder Serpin pointed out this week: "This scraping dynamic means the internet will change... more walled-off websites, more human verification, more isolation between human and agent traffic."
Cloudflare: Building walls and opening windows
Then, Cloudflare stepped in.
Cloudflare is a layer between websites and visitors. It protects websites from attacks, speeds up loading times, and handles traffic at scale. About 20% of websites use it, making it one of the most critical choke points on the internet. When Cloudflare makes decisions about how to handle traffic, one-fifth of the internet is affected.
This also means Cloudflare directly witnessed a surge in bot traffic and the data scraping pressure on public (and private) internet networks—they are working to address this strain.
Initially, this manifested as a feature to block all bots from websites. Then, last year, they introduced "pay-per-crawl," allowing websites to charge AI bots micropayments for scraping data instead of blocking them entirely. When a bot visits a page, it either pays and gains access or receives a 402 "Payment Required" response (does that sound familiar?) with pricing included. Cloudflare handles the billing. This is a middle ground between "block everything" and "give it away for free."
"Pay-as-you-scan" was launched in July. In September, Cloudflare and Coinbase co-founded x402 Foundation. A few days later, they announced NET Dollar, a stablecoin designed for agent payments.
In other words, Cloudflare is both building walls and opening windows—providing both blocking tools and paid access tools. They decide what is kept out, what is allowed in, and under what conditions. This position makes their next decision crucial.
NET Dollar is the real signal
When Cloudflare announced the NET Dollar, they did not specify the issuer.
Despite their partner, the x402 Foundation, Coinbase publicly launching a service for businesses to issue branded stablecoins in December, they have yet to announce it.
Later this week, a report by The Information further confirmed the dynamics we’ve been discussing, causing Cloudflare’s stock to surge. The report specifically noted that it remains undecided who will help Cloudflare launch the NET Dollar, with companies such as "Coinbase and ZeroHash" vying for the deal. This wording leaves room for other companies—such as Stripe.
Additionally, shortly after the MPP release on Wednesday, Cloudflare followed up by releasing an MPP proxy to ensure compatibility with the standard. This isn’t as unusual as it may seem—MPP also supports x402 payments, so it is not a completely independent standard. However, they have not yet officially confirmed any stablecoin issuers, and the companies that co-founded the x402 Foundation are just among many vying for this transaction, inevitably raising questions.
This matters because the NET Dollar is designed as the default currency for "pay-per-scan" and other paid access services offered by Cloudflare. Whoever issues it will have their standard prioritized within Cloudflare’s tech stack. If Coinbase issues the NET Dollar, Cloudflare has a reason to continue building around x402. If Stripe issues it, MPP gains that tailwind. Given that Cloudflare handles one-fifth of internet traffic and is building infrastructure to intercept and monetize machine traffic, this prioritization will determine what becomes the default standard across a significant portion of the internet.
The dispute between x402 and MPP is not important; what matters is which party Cloudflare decides to partner with. That is the real issue.