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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#71

Post by skybrian »

horsawlarway wrote: post #45

I'm going to poke at a downstream consequence here. Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not). So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with. I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc). --- At what point can I…

Wait, what? That makes no more sense than suing Walmart or Costco for having preferred suppliers. If you don’t trust Walmart’s buyers to buy groceries for you then you can shop somewhere else. Similarly here.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#72

Post by altairprime »

petcat wrote: post #4

> NEW YORK – MCP Dev Summit North America – April 2, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it is launching the x402 Foundation with the contribution of the x402 protocol from Coinbase. The new Foundation will serve as the neutral home for x402, a universal standard for payments that embeds payments directly into web interactions, enabling…

x402 — An open protocol for internet-native payments (9 months ago, 147 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347335

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#73

Post by aianus »

mixedbit wrote: post #67

With payments the complexity is not only in accepting a payment, but largely in doing so legally. Someone makes a request to my company's paid service, I return 402 and get a stable coin back. Who do I invoice for this revenue? What value added tax do I apply to the invoice? If someone makes 10k paid requests within one month, do I have means of generating one invoice for them for all the usage, or is every request t…

Who do you invoice if, for example, you own a vending machine that sells chips and sodas for cash or contactless? Why couldn’t this be treated the same?

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#74

Post by mrsssnake »

Internet needs an open, integrated and universal payment layer. But first the payments should be done well (look at: Taler project), then integrations should be build, not the other way around.

I know many people here would be against anything related to payment on the Internet, but I do believe the ability to have a button like "One click here to anonymously with no account pay 0.02€ and download the media" could be a net positive for Internet freedom.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#75

Post by tony_cannistra »

aianus wrote: post #73
mixedbit wrote: post #67

With payments the complexity is not only in accepting a payment, but largely in doing so legally. Someone makes a request to my company's paid service, I return 402 and get a stable coin back. Who do I invoice for this revenue? What value added tax do I apply to the invoice? If someone makes 10k paid requests within one month, do I have means of generating one invoice for them for all the usage, or is every request t…

Who do you invoice if, for example, you own a vending machine that sells chips and sodas for cash or contactless? Why couldn’t this be treated the same?

Vending machines can't be used by thousands of people from differing tax jurisdictions at once

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#76

Post by suprfnk »

mixedbit wrote: post #67

With payments the complexity is not only in accepting a payment, but largely in doing so legally. Someone makes a request to my company's paid service, I return 402 and get a stable coin back. Who do I invoice for this revenue? What value added tax do I apply to the invoice? If someone makes 10k paid requests within one month, do I have means of generating one invoice for them for all the usage, or is every request t…

Seems like a good avenue for money laundering if you can't tell where it comes from.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#77

Post by xur17 »

mpeg wrote: post #70
ryan_n wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there actually a reliable way to differentiate human from bot?

There are reliable ways of differentiating human from cheap, bulk scraping bots. But if the bot is advanced / expensive enough, it gets a lot harder. Where this product's market sits is in giving a paid way to access content compared to having to spin up bots that run js, from real IP addresses, etc. all of which are more expensive

Agreed. To me this feels like the perfect solution for websites and ai crawlers. Instead of having crawlers paying proxy services and captcha solvers, they can pay the website itself. As a web scraper, I'd happily pay the website provider to get access if it meant easy access to the content. Heck, as a human, I'd pay to avoid the dumb captchas.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#79

Post by xur17 »

ygouzerh wrote: post #55
colesantiago wrote: post #15

Can the agents use debit cards? Stablecoins doesn't make sense here and prefer not to use crypto at all.

Actually, x402 was created because using a credit card programmatically is very difficult. The whole business of Stripe is based on that: it's so hard for developers to do, and so many regulations, that they would rather pay an another company to do so. Crypto can be sent just using a contract.transfer() call

And debit / credit cards are horrible for privacy (name and address info is sent along with payments).

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#80

Post by tristor »

nzeid wrote: post #33
VladVladikoff wrote: post #13

I am not a fan of the growing trend that Cloudflare is the gatekeeper of the internet. Personally I will never support this company, or firewall any of my websites behind it.

I'm old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds here. Everyone just uses Cloudflare, which is not a bad thing by itself. But do they _have_ to? Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?

It would be economically impossible for me to run a small personal website without Cloudflare thanks to the sheer quantity of badly behaved automated traffic on the Internet in 2026.
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