The internet service you use every day has just launched its own stablecoin.

Written by: Sleepy.txt

You may not have heard of Cloudflare, but as long as you are online, it is almost impossible to avoid its services.

This company is the “invisible giant” in the internet world. Whether you are ordering takeout, watching short videos, opening your email, or logging into company systems, there is a high probability that you are passing through its network. It acts like a massive digital shield and accelerator, providing security protection and content distribution services for nearly one-fifth of the websites worldwide.

When the web pages you visit open in an instant and your favorite apps can withstand hacker attacks, there is often the presence of Cloudflare behind them. It is the true “water, electricity, and coal” of the internet, supporting the efficient and secure flow of global data as the underlying infrastructure.

On September 25, Cloudflare made a landmark strategic decision, extending the landscape of its infrastructure into a whole new dimension, announcing the launch of its own stablecoin—NET Dollar.

Why issue your own stablecoin?

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince provided an answer, “For decades, the business model of the internet has been built on advertising platforms and bank transfers. The next era of the internet will be driven by pay-per-use, micropayments, and microtransactions.”

Cloudflare's annual revenue exceeds 1.6 billion dollars, handling trillions of requests each day, making it the underlying infrastructure of the internet. However, in this vast digital network, payments are the only aspect not under its control. This sense of loss of control is troubling an increasing number of large enterprises.

Apple settles hundreds of billions of dollars for App Store developers every year, Amazon processes massive cash flows for third-party sellers, and Tesla maintains payment relationships with over 3,000 suppliers worldwide. All these giants face the same friction: lengthy settlement cycles, high fees, and complex cross-border compliance. More critically, they have lost control in the most essential closed loop.

As commerce becomes increasingly digital and automated, this lagging financial infrastructure has become a bottleneck. Therefore, large enterprises choose to respond in a more direct way: if they cannot change the old system, they will build a new one themselves.

Why Large Enterprises Need Their Own Stablecoins

The emergence of NET Dollar prompts a rethinking of the motivations behind stablecoin issuance. Unlike products such as USDT and USDC that pursue universal circulation, Cloudflare's token issuance starts from a more pragmatic point, aiming to first address payment issues within its own business ecosystem.

The difference behind this is not small.

USDT and USDC initially targeted the entire cryptocurrency market, relying on widespread acceptance to accumulate scale; whereas NET Dollar currently seems more like an “internal currency” tailored for Cloudflare's business network.

Of course, the boundaries are not fixed. PayPal's PYUSD is a typical example, as it initially served only PayPal's own payment system when it was launched in 2023, but now it supports exchanges with hundreds of cryptocurrencies, far exceeding its original scope.

Stablecoins for enterprises are likely to follow a similar path, with the opportunity to move from internal efficiency tools to broader circulation scenarios.

The key difference lies in motivation. Traditional stablecoin issuers primarily rely on reserve investments for profit, while companies issue stablecoins to optimize processes and maintain control. This different starting point will determine their differences in design, application, and future paths.

For large companies, payment has always been the “last mile” of the business closed loop, but this segment is controlled by banks and payment institutions, and there are those issues mentioned at the beginning of the article. Therefore, internalizing payment into their own system and rebuilding a controllable closed loop with stablecoins has become the strategic choice of large companies.

The true value of corporate stablecoins lies in their ability to cut through the pain points in processes like a scalpel, significantly enhancing efficiency, rather than pursuing inflated narratives.

In supply chain finance, this value is easier to see.

International supply chain finance is inherently a system full of friction. A payment from the United States to Vietnam has to cross multiple time zones, various currencies, and several banks. According to data from the World Bank, the global average remittance cost is still over 6%.

Average transaction cost of remittances to specific countries/regions (%)｜Source: WORLD BANK GROUP

Stablecoins can compress this process to a matter of minutes. American companies can directly transfer payments to suppliers in Vietnam within minutes, reducing costs to below 1%. The transit time of funds is significantly shortened, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the supply chain.

More importantly, the ownership of settlement power has also changed.

In the past, banks acted as intermediaries, controlling the speed and cost of transactions; whereas in the stablecoin network, businesses can take the lead in this critical aspect.

In addition to efficiency, cost is also a burden that enterprises cannot ignore. In cross-border payments, losses from exchange rates, bank processing fees, and card organization channel fees may seem like insignificant expenditures, but they can accumulate to erode a company's competitiveness.

The significance of stablecoins for enterprises lies in this, as they bypass traditional financial intermediaries and restructure cost structures. The change is not only a reduction in absolute amounts, but also in the simplification and transparency of structures. Under the traditional model, enterprises face a complex fee system, including fixed fees, percentage fees, exchange rate differentials, and intermediary fees, with opaque calculation methods that make precise predictions difficult.

In the stablecoin network, the cost is almost reduced to one item, the on-chain transaction fees. It is public, predictable, and relatively stable. As a result, businesses can more accurately calculate their expenditures and profits, making decisions with greater confidence.

Comparison of Traditional Financial Global Payment Segment and Stablecoin Payment Segment | Source: SevenX Ventures

Furthermore, the management of cash flow itself can be transformed. Traditional practices rely on manual operations and banking systems, which are complex, inefficient, and prone to errors.

When a stablecoin is combined with smart contracts, fund flows can be automatically executed according to preset conditions. After the supplier delivers and passes inspection, the payment is automatically released; when the project reaches a milestone, the corresponding funds are disbursed instantly. Enterprises no longer need to manually monitor accounts but instead embed the rules into the contract.

The changes brought about by this mechanism are not just about efficiency improvements. The transparent and tamper-proof payment logic reduces the trust costs between the cooperating parties, and also resolves potential disputes in advance.

As more partners are incorporated into the same payment system, network effects begin to emerge. Suppliers, distributors, partners, and even end users settle in the same stablecoin, and the value of the network will increase exponentially.

This value is not only reflected in scale, but also creates a locking effect. Once deeply integrated into a certain enterprise's stablecoin system, the cost of switching to other systems becomes high, including not only the costs of technology switching, but also the costs of learning, relationships, and even opportunity costs.

This layer of stickiness will become the strongest moat for enterprises. In intense competition, companies with a stablecoin ecosystem can not only better control costs and cash flow, but also rely on network effects to strengthen their long-term advantages.

How Stablecoins Enter Various Industries

Different industries have their own pain points, and stablecoins are being viewed as potential solutions. They may not have been widely adopted yet, but they have already demonstrated the possibility of penetrating real business.

E-commerce Platform: Automation of Margin, Commission and Refunds

For e-commerce platforms, stablecoins are becoming a testing tool for building a new generation of payment infrastructure. The collaboration between Shopify and Coinbase allows merchants in 34 countries to accept USDC settlements, but this is just the beginning.

The deposit paid by merchants when registering can be directly written into a smart contract, automatically deducted in case of violations, and refunded automatically after the contract period expires. The platform's commission can also be settled in real-time; each time a transaction is completed, the system automatically transfers from the merchant's stablecoin account to the platform.

The refund process has also been redefined. In the past, cross-border refunds often took several weeks and had to go through multiple banking procedures; with stablecoins, it can be received in just a few minutes, providing a completely different experience.

Furthermore, stablecoins can also support micropayment scenarios. Consumers can pay for browsing product pages, pay for personalized recommendations, and even pay for priority customer service. These fragmented transactions, which are almost impossible in traditional payment systems, can all be realized in a stablecoin environment.

Manufacturing Giants: A Unified Network for Supplier Payments and Inventory Financing

The globalization of the manufacturing industry is at its highest level, with supply chains often spanning dozens of countries. For companies like Apple and Tesla, coordinating payments, financing, and margins for thousands of suppliers is itself a massive system engineering challenge.

If these companies issue their own stablecoins, they can establish an efficient and low-cost payment network internally. Payments to upstream suppliers, inventory financing arrangements, and managing quality assurance deposits—processes that previously required cross-bank, cross-currency, and relied heavily on manual efforts—can all be completed instantly within the same network.

More importantly, this digital payment system can be integrated with the existing management systems of enterprises. When the ERP detects a shortage of components, it can automatically trigger an order and complete the payment; when the quality inspection system identifies problematic batches, it can also immediately deduct funds from the supplier's deposit.

Taking Tesla as an example, it has over three thousand suppliers spread across more than thirty countries. If stablecoins were used for unified settlement, suppliers could directly use “Tesla Coin,” with Tesla handling the dollar conversions. This would not only reduce costs but also mean having greater control in key areas.

Content Platform: New Paths for Revenue Sharing and Micropayments

The content industry is undergoing a reconstruction driven by creators. Whether it's short video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, or text platforms like Substack and Medium, the biggest challenge is how to efficiently and fairly distribute revenue to global creators.

Corporate stablecoins are seen as a potential solution. They allow platforms to settle revenue shares with global creators instantly, without relying on complex cross-border banking systems, and can also avoid high fees. Furthermore, the micropayment mechanism enables profit distribution to be divided into finer segments.

YouTube pays creators hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue sharing every year, but payment methods vary by country, exchange rate fluctuations affect actual income, and tax processes are extremely complicated. If the platform builds its own stablecoin network, it can achieve truly unified global settlement.

This mechanism may also give rise to new business models where readers can pay to read by the article, viewers can pay for individual video clips, and listeners can pay for a song. More refined value distribution not only allows creators to receive more direct returns but also encourages them to produce higher quality content.

Cloud Service Providers: Settlement Testing Ground for Machine Economy

Cloudflare's NET Dollar can be seen as a typical case of cloud service providers attempting stablecoins. With the development of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, communication and transactions between machines are becoming increasingly frequent. They are characterized by high frequency, small amounts, and full automation, which traditional payment systems cannot support.

In this scenario, an AI model may need to pay for the API of another model, an IoT device has to settle the computing power it consumes, and a self-driving car needs to pay for map services. These payments may only be a few cents or even a few tenths of a cent, yet they could be triggered thousands of times within a second.

Stablecoins, especially forms designed for programmatic trading like NET Dollar, can support such high-frequency, low-value automated payments. Machines can autonomously decide the payment time, amount, and recipient based on pre-set rules without human intervention.

To this end, Cloudflare has partnered with Coinbase to establish the x402 Foundation, which is developing a protocol that allows direct payments between machines. When one AI model calls the service of another model, the fees are settled instantly. This kind of exploration is building the necessary payment infrastructure for the future machine economy.

Cloudflare developed x402 trial arena real-time demonstration interface | Source: Cloudflare

Stablecoin Swaps and the New B2B Payment Network

Once every large enterprise has issued stablecoins, the subsequent question is how these “corporate currencies” can interoperate. The answer points to a brand new B2B payment network.

In such a network, stablecoins from different enterprises can be seamlessly converted through swap protocols, potentially relying on liquidity pools from decentralized exchanges. A vendor receiving payment in “Tesla Coin” can instantly exchange it for “Apple Coin” or USD, without having to go through the cumbersome banking system.

To make this system truly operate, there are still several barriers that need to be overcome.

First is the exchange rate pricing. How is the exchange ratio formed between different stablecoins of various enterprises? This may require a supply and demand pricing mechanism similar to that of the foreign exchange market.

Secondly, there is the source of liquidity. Who will provide sufficient liquidity? Is it reliant on professional market makers, or will it be through mutual channels established between enterprises? There is currently no conclusion, and further exploration is needed in the industry.

Finally, there is risk management. During the exchange process, how can we prevent credit risk and operational risk? This is not only a technical issue, but also requires clear guidance at the compliance level.

Stripe has already tested the waters in this direction. In May 2025, it launched the world's first payment AI model and launched a stablecoin payment suite. Businesses can simply activate it with one click on the platform to settle using USDC across multiple public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon.

Stripe's approach is clear: instead of issuing its own coin, it would be better to allow more businesses to easily integrate stablecoin settlements, thereby positioning itself as the underlying infrastructure for stablecoin payments.

Interestingly, “industry alliance stablecoins” may form within specific industries. For example, several major automobile manufacturers could jointly issue a type of “car coin” that covers the entire chain of settlement from parts procurement to vehicle sales. This unified currency system can significantly reduce transaction costs and also promote industry collaboration.

The complexity of the automotive industry supply chain makes it the most suitable testing ground. A car involves tens of thousands of components, with suppliers spread across the globe. If the entire chain settles with the same stablecoin, it can bypass the redundant processes of multiple currencies and banks, greatly simplifying payments.

The advantages of stablecoins in the alliance are also very apparent. The scale of the industry is sufficient to support liquidity, the trading model is standardized, and the closed-loop reduces the impact on the traditional financial system. However, challenges also exist, such as how to balance the interests of different enterprises, whether large enterprises will take the opportunity to strengthen control, and whether the governance mechanism can remain transparent. These questions can only be answered through practice.

All ideas regarding corporate stablecoins ultimately hinge on regulatory compliance. Whether it is a single enterprise or an industry alliance, achieving genuine market acceptance requires the establishment of transparent reserve custody, regular third-party audits, and sufficient disclosures to regulatory authorities.

In July 2025, the U.S. “GENIUS Act” will come into effect, establishing clear legal boundaries for the issuance of stablecoins for the first time. Stablecoins issued with a scale exceeding $10 billion must be subject to federal regulation, with reserves limited to U.S. dollars, bank deposits, or short-term U.S. Treasury securities, and completely isolated from the issuer's other assets.

In August of the same year, Hong Kong's “Stablecoin Regulation” was officially implemented. It requires issuers to hold at least HKD 25 million in paid-in capital, to be subject to ongoing supervision and annual audits by the Monetary Authority, and to establish a complete system for anti-money laundering and customer identity verification.

For enterprises, compliance is not just a “must-do” requirement, but also a prerequisite for gaining trust. Without transparent and reliable reserve management, no matter how strong the business logic is, it will be difficult to persuade suppliers, partners, and customers to follow.

Stablecoins and the New Business Order

The emergence of corporate stablecoins is not just a change in payment tools, but a precursor to the restructuring of future business order.

They deeply couple payment and systems, granting devices and programs independent economic capabilities. Autonomous vehicles can autonomously complete charging and settlement when the battery is low, and industrial robots can automatically place orders for procurement when parts are worn out, thus machines transform from “tools” into real economic entities.

Micro-payments provide a new distribution logic for the content industry, allowing videos to be billed by the second, novels by the chapter, and software by functionality. Income is segmented more finely, and the incentive mechanisms change accordingly.

After the integration with artificial intelligence, the imagination space is further opened. Once AI agents have a stablecoin budget, they can autonomously procure data, computing power, or other services to complete complex tasks.

In September 2025, Google launched the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), partnering with sixty organizations to create a payment channel for AI agents, allowing them to settle directly when performing tasks. This means that AI will no longer just be a tool but will possess economic capabilities as “digital employees,” forming a new collaborative relationship with humans.

For banks and payment companies, this is a structural challenge. If enterprises can build their own payment and clearing systems, the role of traditional financial institutions in cross-border settlement and treasury management will be weakened. In the future, banks are more likely to turn to roles such as reserve fund custody, compliance, and auditing, while payment companies will need to become providers of stablecoin infrastructure.

From a more macro perspective, stablecoins for enterprises may signify the emergence of a new business order. In this system, value creation and distribution will be accomplished with unprecedented efficiency, and business relationships will also become more transparent and efficient.

From the medieval Venetian bills to today's stablecoins, the logic has always been the pursuit of a more efficient medium of exchange. In this technology-driven transformation, any enterprise that wants to secure a place in the future digital economy cannot remain aloof.

Source: Sleepy.txt