Announcing the Monetization Gateway: charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

Because they felt the web wasn't being enshittified quite fast enough.

Fuck these guys. Fuck the attitude of money money money. The Internet and the WWW was built to share information.

Worth noting this is specifically for "A.I. agents". The problem listed in the article, is that the current web is supported by advertising. Ads mean nothing to the bot, and don't generate revenue for the website, and also outnumber human viewers by a huge amount, meaning a huge cost and revenue loss.

The aim of this technology is you would give your A.I. agent access to a "stablecoin wallet", and it would automatically pay for services it accesses when you ask it to do things. I've never used agents or stable coin so this is all meaningless to me. Hopefully someone else can chime in with what this would mean in practice for users of these technologies.

This is what we are building toward: an agent-first Internet with Internet-scale settlement built in. Where the people who make something worth paying for get paid by the software that uses it, automatically. [...] and the independent creator is paid by the large language models that use their work.

I just want to block clankers why are all these changes blocking humans and allowing clankers.

God damn, people can't resist fucking things up. If your purpose for putting something on the internet isn't to share knowledge, then fuck your thing, and fuck you.

Seems interesting. Hope this is not just an attempt of CF to become universal payment gateway of the web. Maybe bitcoin with lightning can finally find a legitimate niche.