Good morning,
Forgive me father for I have sinned (I’ve started posting face-to-camera videos on AI research). Pls follow if you’re into this kind of thing!
Love,
Editor: Miranda
This edition is brought to you by Across. If you have ever moved assets between chains and aged five years waiting for the bridge, Across is the fix. Fast, cheap, and it’s the one we actually use.
The internet is getting a cash register.
Last week Cloudflare opened the waitlist for its Monetization Gateway, which lets anyone charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool sitting behind Cloudflare, with payments settling in stablecoins.
When the web's plumbing was written in 1996, engineers reserved an error code, HTTP 402: Payment Required. Then nobody used it for 29 years, because the internet chose a different business model, which is that everything is free, and you pay with your attention.
That model assumed the visitor was a person, but it isn't anymore. 52% of crawler requests on Cloudflare are now AI training traffic, up from 22% in spring 2025. Agents don't watch ads or hold subscriptions, they just consume. So Cloudflare, which sits in front of roughly 20% of the web, is flipping the model.
It works like this: an agent requests your page, gets told the price, pays in stablecoins, and gets the page. No signup, no API key, no checkout.
Crypto skeptics, hold still for one paragraph, because this is a stablecoin use case that makes sense. These payments would presumably be the micro-est of micro, call it fractions of a cent. They’d be settled in under a second, with no chargebacks and no banking hours. Stablecoins do all of that, and x402 already processed 160 million agentic payments in its first year.
Now much is left to be figured out, like pricing, the user/browser/agent wallet infrastructure and funding mechanism, but the direction is set.
The buyer is becoming a bot (as I’ve been saying).
Quick Hits.
Robots are doing customs now. Humanoid robots are working a China-Vietnam border crossing. Somewhere a TSA agent felt a chill.
Trump's annual disclosure lists $1.4B of his $2.2B in 2025 income coming from crypto. Honestly no joke here it’s so grim.
A yassified gas station went viral last week and as one reply put it, ‘this would work on me.’
Sotheby's is auctioning Jensen Huang’s signed leather jacket for $40K-$60K, roughly the price of one of his own Blackwell chips.
Brazilian Twitter is arguing about whether the decline of their football team is paired with the decline of Catholicism in their country.
This video of Erling Haaland has over 23M views and I account for a large percentage of them!
If you liked this edition, send it to a friend who is thinking about data centers. ILY.
