Written by: David Christopher

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

The debate between x402 and MPP is a misdirection. The real question is: who will Cloudflare choose to issue the NET Dollar stablecoin?

Recently, Stripe launched MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) as the flagship product for the Tempo mainnet.

To briefly introduce: Tempo is an EVM public chain focused on payments, created by former employees of Paradigm and a core developer from Ethereum. MPP is an open protocol based on HTTP for payments between agents and machines, reactivating the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code (Payment Required), which is similar to x402 but based on a different architectural concept.

The core trade-offs of the two protocols are very straightforward: x402 values openness more; MPP integrates better with existing payment systems, but at the cost of being tied to the Stripe ecosystem.

Rather than continuing to debate these technical details, it's better to look at it from another dimension. At this stage, arguing which technology is superior between MPP and x402 is of little significance. Beneath the surface, there is a more important, more influential struggle: Coinbase and Stripe are vying for partnership opportunities with the third-party giant Cloudflare, and Cloudflare's allegiance will greatly affect which standard becomes mainstream in the industry.

Web Crawlers Destroyed the Old Model

Before we dive in, let's reiterate the core issue that agent payments aim to solve: AI agents have made web scraping far too easy.

From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia's traffic surged by 50% due to crawlers, putting immense pressure on servers and driving costs sky-high. At least 65% of its high consumption requests came from bots. In February 2025, the image website DiscoverLife was bombarded with millions of bot requests daily, nearly crippling the site. In August, cloud service provider Fastly reported that a bot was requesting a website at a rate of 39,000 times per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) faced a similar situation and described the surge of bots as "equivalent to a functional denial of service attack." On a day in November, its traffic soared by 968% year-on-year.

Although websites implemented robots.txt rules (to inform crawlers what can and cannot be scraped), over 13% of crawlers directly ignore these rules. They overload servers, putting immense pressure on websites reliant on donations.

Commercial websites have not been spared: Reddit tightened its request frequency limits; eight out of the top ten news websites globally now block bots meant for training; overall, 71% of leading content platforms completely block scraper crawlers.

Trend of daily website requests by AI bots

However, the internet is not fully locked down. Websites that provide high-priced, timely data (prices, hotel reservations, professional datasets) have started charging for data access. Ordinary, low-value content can still be scraped for free through caching and proxies. Crawlers will not disappear, but the internet is splitting into: free content and paid content. This is precisely why x402 and MPP have emerged.

As Ethos Network founder Serpin said, "This trend of crawling means the internet will change: more closed websites, more human verification, more separation between human and machine traffic."

Cloudflare is in a Key Position

Cloudflare acts as an intermediary layer between websites and visitors: protecting against attacks, accelerating loading, and handling large-scale traffic. About 20% of websites globally use it, making it one of the most critical hubs on the internet. Any decision Cloudflare makes regarding traffic rules will impact one-fifth of the internet.

This also means Cloudflare is feeling the pressure from the surge in bot traffic and the flood of crawlers, and it is working to address it.

Initially, it merely provided functionality for websites to block all bots. Last year, Cloudflare launched "Pay-per-Crawl": websites do not have to directly block bots but can charge small fees to AI crawlers. When bots access pages, they either pay for access or receive a 402 "Payment Required" response. Billing is managed by Cloudflare. This is a compromise between "total ban" and "totally free."

After launching Pay-per-Crawl in July, in September Cloudflare co-founded the x402 Foundation with Coinbase. A few days later, they announced the launch of NET Dollar—a stablecoin for agent payments.

In other words, Cloudflare is both building "walls" (blocking) and opening "windows" (paid access). It determines who is kept out, who may enter, and under what conditions. It is this position that makes its upcoming choices critical.

NET Dollar is the Real Signal

When Cloudflare announced the NET Dollar, it did not disclose the issuer. Even by December, when its partner Coinbase publicly launched custom enterprise stablecoin issuance services, Cloudflare still has not made an official announcement.

However, a report from The Information this week clarified the situation: who Cloudflare is partnering with to issue NET Dollar remains undecided, with companies like Coinbase and ZeroHash competing for this partnership, leaving room for others (like Stripe).

More notably, just after the MPP was released on Wednesday, Cloudflare immediately launched an MPP-compatible proxy. This is not surprising, as MPP also supports x402 payments, so the two are not entirely opposing standards. But the problem is: Cloudflare has not determined the stablecoin issuer; Coinbase, which co-founded the x402 Foundation with it, is merely one of many bidders.

Why is this important? Because NET Dollar will become the default currency for Cloudflare's "Pay-per-Crawl" and other paid access services. Whoever is responsible for issuing it will have their corresponding payment standard prioritized within the Cloudflare system.

• If Coinbase issues NET Dollar → Cloudflare will continue to build around x402
• If Stripe issues → MPP will gain substantial momentum

Considering that Cloudflare covers one-fifth of the world's websites and is building a "blocking + paid" bot traffic system, its choice will directly determine which protocol becomes mainstream on the internet.

Debating whether x402 or MPP is better is far less important than focusing on who Cloudflare ultimately chooses to partner with. That is the real core issue.