From x402 to MPP: Cloudflare's crucial vote, will it go to Coinbase or Stripe?

Author: David Christopher

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

This week, as Stripe launched its flagship product MPP (Machine Payment Protocol) on the Tempo mainnet.

In case you didn't know, Tempo is an L1 EVM chain built by former Paradigm employees and former Ethereum core developers, optimized specifically 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, although the architectural concepts of the two are different.

Tempo Mainnet: The Battle for Agentic Commerce 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 integrated into the Stripe ecosystem.

Rather than further debate these nuances, let's shift our focus to another dimension. I believe that arguing about the technical merits of MPP versus x402 at this stage is of little value. Beneath the surface, a more interesting and impactful dynamic is at play: Coinbase and Stripe may be vying to establish partnerships with a third powerful and well-established participant, whose support could significantly influence which standard becomes mainstream.

AI Crawlers Overwhelm the Web

But first, before diving deeper, let's reiterate one of the core issues that agent payments aim to solve: agents have made data scraping (the process of extracting data from websites) too easy.

From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia's traffic surged by 50% as a result, overwhelming servers and causing operational costs to skyrocket. At least 65% of their 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 a near standstill. In August, cloud service provider Fastly reported a case where a bot aggressively attacked a website at a rate of 39,000 requests per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) also reported similar impacts, stating that this wave of scraping "is functionally equivalent to a denial-of-service attack." On one day in November 2025, their traffic soared by 968% compared to the previous year.

Despite measures like implementing robots.txt files (which essentially set rules for where bots can and cannot access on a website), over 13% of scraping tools ignored these rules. They overloaded servers and stressed websites, many of which rely on donations. But commercial websites were not spared either. Reddit tightened its rate limits. Currently, 8 out of the 10 largest news websites block training bots. Across the broader web, 71% of top publishers completely block retrieval bots.

However, the web has not been uniformly blocked. Websites that provide expensive or time-sensitive data (such as prices, hotel bookings, professional datasets) have begun charging for access. Everyday or low-value content can still be scraped for free through caching or proxies. Data scraping has not disappeared; it has instead bifurcated into free and paid categories. This is precisely why x402 and MPP have become necessary.

As Serpin, founder of Ethos Network, pointed out this week: "This scraping dynamic means the internet will change... more closed websites, more human verification, and more isolation of traffic between humans and agents."

Cloudflare: Building Walls and Opening Windows

Enter Cloudflare.

Cloudflare acts as 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 chokepoints on the internet. When Cloudflare makes decisions about how to handle traffic, one-fifth of the internet is affected.

This also means that Cloudflare directly observes the surge in bot traffic and the data scraping pressure on the public (and private) internet—they are working to address this pressure.

Initially, this manifested as a feature allowing websites to block all bots. Then, last year, they launched "pay-per-crawl," allowing websites to charge AI bots micro-payment fees for scraping data instead of completely blocking them. When a bot accesses a page, it either pays and gains access or receives a 402 "Payment Required" response with pricing (sounds familiar?). Cloudflare handles the billing. This is a compromise between "block everything" and "give it away for free."

"Pay-per-crawl" launched in July. In September, Cloudflare and Coinbase jointly established the x402 Foundation. Days later, they announced NET Dollar, a stablecoin for agent payments.

In other words, Cloudflare is both building walls and opening windows. It provides blocking tools as well as 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 NET Dollar, they did not specify the issuer.

Although its x402 Foundation partner Coinbase publicly launched a service in December for businesses to issue branded stablecoins, they have yet to disclose it.

Then this week, a report from The Information further confirmed the dynamic we have been discussing, leading to a surge in Cloudflare's stock price. The report specifically mentioned that who will help Cloudflare launch NET Dollar remains an open question, with "companies like Coinbase and ZeroHash" competing for the deal. This wording leaves room for other companies—like Stripe.

Moreover, shortly after the release of MPP on Wednesday, Cloudflare quickly released an MPP proxy to be compatible with the standard. This is not as strange as it seems—MPP also supports x402 payments, so it is not a completely independent standard. However, they have not formally identified the stablecoin issuer, and the company that co-founded the x402 Foundation with them is just one of many vying for this deal, which undoubtedly raises questions.

This is important for the following reason: NET Dollar is built as the default currency for "pay-per-crawl" and other paid access services from Cloudflare. Whoever issues it will have their standard prioritized in Cloudflare's tech stack. If Coinbase issues NET Dollar, Cloudflare will have reason to continue building around x402. If Stripe issues it, MPP will gain the tailwind. Given that Cloudflare handles one-fifth of the internet's traffic and is building infrastructure to intercept bot traffic and monetize it, this prioritization will determine what becomes the default standard across a significant portion of the internet.

The battle between x402 and MPP is not what matters; what matters is Cloudflare's decision on whom to partner with. That is the real issue at hand.