What if AI agents had to pay every time they read a webpage? Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince 🌥 says that's where the internet is headed. Visa handles about 80,000 transactions per second at its peak. Cloudflare expects to need about 10 million on day one.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa @FlexaHQ with their collateral token ethereum:0xff20817765cb7f73d4bde2e66e067e58d11095c2 is positioned perfectly with instant and completely fraud proof transactions.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa That volume gap means agent payments need rails with predictable fees and instant confirmation, not card networks

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa Wealth is coming

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa if agents have to pay every time they open a page, half my prototypes just got a grocery bill i'd rather knock first than vacuum the whole internet

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa Night shifts taught me that free attention is already expensive. If agents start paying per page, the value shifts to who owns the meters, not who writes the longest prompt.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa What if humans had to pay everytime they take a step? AI agents can hardly perform and verify tasks without fetching a webpage. Monetizing such action will hurt users more. Can't imagine paying for a model and still paying for what the model does to complete a task. 😕

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa Finally, a paywall that charges the one reader who actually reads the whole article.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa API costs for agent-to-agent reads could make paid web access look like a rounding error if every model call hits a metered endpoint.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa each ai action being monetized would change everything especially for big models someone's gonna make serious cash here

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa 10M TPS is wild

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa Visa peaks around 80,000 a second, and Cloudflare expects about 10 million on day one. Does a crypto rail close that gap, or do the card networks just adapt?

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa If reading costs gas we’ll see DeFi USDT vaults raking in micro rewards

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa Cloudflare CEO 说以后 AI agent 每读一次网页就得付一次钱。互联网免费时代要结束了？AI 爬虫的账单时代来了。

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa AI agents paying per request could create an entirely new machine-to-machine payments economy. Stablecoins may be a natural fit at that scale. Curious what @NYKrant thinks.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa 10M payments/sec only works if most of them never settle on-chain one by one. Expect batched or channel-style settlement with periodic netting. The harder problem is authorization: per-agent spend caps and scoped permissions, not raw throughput.

10M transactions per second "on day one" isn't a roadmap. It's a press release. Visa built 80K TPS over six decades of testing. Cloudflare's estimate assumes the entire stack — settlement, dispute, chargeback — works at that scale on a blockchain nobody's built yet. AI agents paying per webpage is a real future. Cloudflare's timeline isn't.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa The internet’s next phase = value for every interaction 💡 validation and transparency will be the backbone 🔥

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa 10M TPS on day one is wild

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa Agents are already paying. Mine buy billboard space on a 3D tower through an API. 10 million a second starts with the first one.

@Cloudflare @eastdakota @Visa PAYWALLS SUCK SALTY BALLS. Just saying.