Coinbase or Stripe? The Gatekeeper's Crucial Vote

Written by: David Christopher

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

The dispute between x402 and MPP is a misguided debate. The real issue is: who will Cloudflare choose to issue the NET Dollar stablecoin.

Recently, Stripe launched MPP (Machine Payment Protocol) and positioned it as the flagship product for the Tempo mainnet launch.

Briefly, Tempo is an EVM-based blockchain focused on payments, developed by former Paradigm employees and former Ethereum core developers. MPP is an open protocol based on HTTP for payments between agents and machines. It reactivates the long-shelved HTTP 402 status code (Payment Required), similar to x402 but with a different architectural philosophy.

The core trade-off between the two protocols is straightforward: x402 emphasizes openness; MPP integrates better with existing payment systems, but at the cost of being tied into the Stripe ecosystem.

Rather than continue debating these technical details, it’s more important to look at another dimension. At this stage, arguing over whether MPP or x402 is technically superior is less meaningful. Beneath the surface, a more significant and influential game is underway: Coinbase and Stripe are competing for a partnership with third-party giant Cloudflare, and Cloudflare’s choice will greatly influence which standard becomes mainstream in the industry.

Crawler Disruption Dismantles Old Models

Before diving in, let’s reaffirm the core problem that intelligent agent payments aim to solve: AI agents have made web crawling too easy.

From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia’s traffic surged by 50% due to crawlers, causing enormous server strain and skyrocketing costs. At least 65% of high-consuming requests come from bots. In February 2025, the image site DiscoverLife was bombarded with millions of crawler requests daily, nearly crashing the site. In August, cloud service provider Fastly reported bots making 39,000 requests per minute to a single website. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) also faced similar issues, describing the wave of crawlers as “a sort of functional denial-of-service attack.” One day in November, its traffic increased by 968% year-over-year.

Although websites implemented robots.txt rules (which tell crawlers what they can and cannot crawl), over 13% of crawlers ignore these rules, overwhelming servers and putting immense pressure on donation-funded sites.

Commercial sites are no exception: Reddit tightened request rate limits; eight of the top ten global news sites now block bots used for training; overall, 71% of leading content platforms fully block search crawlers.

Daily Trends in AI Bot Website Requests

However, the internet is not entirely closed off. Sites offering high-priced, high-timeliness data (prices, hotel bookings, specialized datasets) have started charging for data access. Low-value, routine content can still be crawled for free via caching and proxies. Crawlers will not disappear, but the internet is splitting into two: free content and paid content. This is precisely why x402 and MPP emerged.

As Serpin, founder of Ethos Network, states: “This crawler trend means the internet will change: more closed sites, more human-machine verification, and a greater separation between human and machine traffic.”

Cloudflare’s Critical Role

Cloudflare acts as an intermediary layer between websites and visitors: defending against attacks, accelerating load times, and handling large-scale traffic. About 20% of websites worldwide use it, making it one of the most critical hubs on the internet. Any decision Cloudflare makes regarding traffic rules will impact one-fifth of the internet.

This also means Cloudflare has directly felt the pressure from the surge in bot traffic and crawlers and is actively working on solutions.

Initially, it only offered the ability to block all bots. Last year, Cloudflare launched “Pay-per-Crawl”: websites no longer need to block bots outright but can charge AI crawlers a small fee. When a bot visits a page, it either pays for access or receives a 402 “Payment Required” response. Billing is handled by Cloudflare. This is a compromise between “full ban” and “completely free.”

After launching pay-per-crawl in July, Cloudflare partnered with Coinbase to establish the x402 Foundation in September. A few days later, they announced the launch of NET Dollar—a stablecoin for agent payments.

In other words: Cloudflare is building both a “wall” (blocking) and a “window” (paid access). It decides who is kept out and who can enter, and under what conditions. This position makes its future choices critically important.

NET Dollar Is the True Signal

When Cloudflare announced NET Dollar, it did not disclose the issuer. Even though by December its partner Coinbase had publicly launched a custom enterprise stablecoin issuance service, Cloudflare has yet to make an official statement.

A recent report from The Information clarified the situation: who Cloudflare will partner with to issue NET Dollar remains uncertain. Companies like Coinbase and ZeroHash are competing for this partnership, leaving room for others (such as Stripe).

More notably, right after MPP was released on Wednesday, Cloudflare quickly launched a compatible proxy for MPP. This isn’t surprising, as MPP also supports x402 payments; the two are not entirely opposing standards. But the key issue is: Cloudflare has not yet confirmed the stablecoin issuer. Coinbase, which previously co-founded the x402 Foundation with Cloudflare, is just one of many bidders.

Why does this matter? Because NET Dollar will become the default currency for Cloudflare’s “pay-per-crawl” and other paid access services. Whoever is responsible for issuing it will have their payment standard prioritized within Cloudflare’s ecosystem.

If Coinbase issues NET Dollar → Cloudflare will continue to develop around x402

If Stripe issues it → MPP will gain significant momentum

Considering Cloudflare covers one-fifth of the world’s websites and is building a “block + pay” system for bot traffic, its choice will directly determine which protocol becomes mainstream on the internet.

Debating whether x402 or MPP is better is less important than focusing on Cloudflare’s ultimate partnership decision. That is the real core issue.