Overview
- Cloudflare announced the Monetization Gateway and opened a waitlist for customers to adopt the extension that enforces payments at the network edge.
- Payments through the gateway settle in stablecoins over the open x402 protocol and use an HTTP 402 flow that retries requests with proof of payment to grant access without redirects or accounts.
- Verification of payments runs on Cloudflare's distributed edge across more than 330 cities to cut latency and keep payment traffic from hitting origin servers.
- Developers can set per-endpoint and usage-based pricing rules in Cloudflare's dashboard, API, or via Terraform so services can charge for APIs, datasets, web pages, and MCP tools.
- Cloudflare frames the product for AI-agent and machine-to-machine commerce and its launch joins other moves by infrastructure players to make stablecoins a fast rail for many small automated payments.