Cloudflare, which routes roughly 20% of global web traffic, launched its Monetization Gateway on July 1, 2026, allowing sellers to charge for web resources with USDC stablecoin (digital token designed to maintain a stable value) payments settled on Base and Polygon. The system uses x402, a revived version of HTTP status code 402, to support near-instant stablecoin payments with negligible fees. Its intended users are AI agents making sub-cent payments for APIs, data feeds and computing resources rather than consumers making conventional purchases. Will Papper, who joined Cloudflare as Director of Product in July 2026, says internet payment infrastructure must eventually handle 5 million to 50 million transactions per second. He has identified Ethereum's original sharding design, which divides processing across parallel segments, as a viable model for a blockchain distributed across multiple machines. Papper's rationale is that payment units are fungible, so the system need not maintain complex state for each transaction; in his formulation, one dollar is interchangeable with another. Ethereum later adopted a rollup-centric roadmap. Cloudflare's position between internet clients and servers could give it a central role in machine-to-machine commerce. The move also creates a use case for stablecoins beyond remittances and trading, while increasing potential on-chain volume for USDC issuer Circle across Base and Polygon. The choice of those networks over alternatives including Solana and Arbitrum reflects Cloudflare's stated focus on speed, cost and reliability for payment workloads.