Author: David Christopher

Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher

This week, as Stripe launches its flagship product MPP (Machine Payment Protocol) on the Tempo mainnet.

In case you are not aware, Tempo is an L1 EVM chain built by former Paradigm employees and former Ethereum core developers, optimized specifically for payments. MPP is an open agent-to-machine payment protocol based on HTTP that resurrects the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code, similar to x402, though the architectural concepts differ.

Tempo Mainnet: The Battle of Agentic Commerce on Bankless

The core trade-off between these two protocols is straightforward: x402 prioritizes openness, while MPP offers superior integration with existing payment rails at the cost of fitting into the Stripe ecosystem.

Rather than further debating these nuances, let’s shift our focus to another dimension. I believe there is little value in arguing the technical merits of MPP versus x402 at this stage. Beneath the surface, a more interesting and influential dynamic is at play: Coinbase and Stripe may be vying to establish partnerships with a third powerful and entrenched participant, whose support could significantly affect which standard becomes mainstream.

AI Crawlers Overwhelming the Web

But first, before delving deeper, let’s restate one of the core issues that agent payments aim to resolve: agents have made data scraping (the process of extracting data from websites) too easy.

From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia's traffic surged by 50% as a result, overwhelming servers and causing operating costs to skyrocket. At least 65% of their most resource-intensive requests came from bots. In February 2025, bots bombarded the image library DiscoverLife with millions of requests per day, slowing the site to nearly unusable levels. In August, cloud service provider Fastly reported a case where a bot attacked a website at a rate of 39,000 requests per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) also reported similar impacts, stating that this wave of scraping "is functionally equivalent to a denial-of-service attack." On one day in November 2025, their traffic skyrocketed by 968% compared to the previous year.

Despite efforts to implement measures such as adding robots.txt files (essentially rules dictating where bots can and cannot access on a website), over 13% of scraping tools ignored these rules. They overloaded servers and stressed websites, many of which rely on donations. Commercial sites were not spared, either. Reddit tightened its rate limits. Currently, 8 out of the 10 largest news websites block training bots. On a wider scale, 71% of top publishers completely block scraping bots.

However, the web has not been uniformly blocked. Websites that provide expensive or time-sensitive data (such as prices, hotel bookings, and professional datasets) have started charging for access. Everyday or low-value content can still be scraped for free through caching or proxies. Data scraping has not disappeared; it has differentiated into free and paid categories. This is precisely why x402 and MPP have become necessary.

As noted by Serpin, founder of Ethos Network, this week: "This scraping dynamic means the internet will change...more closed websites, more human verification, and more segregation of traffic between humans and agents."

Cloudflare: Building Walls and Opening Windows

Thus, Cloudflare has emerged.

Cloudflare acts as a layer between websites and visitors. It protects websites from attacks, accelerates loading times, and handles traffic on a large scale. About 20% of websites use it, making it one of the most critical chokepoints on the internet. When Cloudflare makes decisions on how to handle traffic, one-fifth of the internet is impacted.

This also means that Cloudflare sees a direct surge in bot traffic and the data scraping pressure on public (and private) internet - they are working to alleviate this pressure.

Initially, this manifested as a feature to block all bots from websites. Then last year, they launched "pay-per-crawl," allowing websites to charge bots micro-payment fees for scraping data instead of completely blocking them. When a bot accesses a page, it either pays and gains access or receives a 402 "Payment Required" response with pricing (sounds familiar?). Cloudflare handles the billing. This is a compromise between "blocking everything" and "giving it away for free."

"Pay-per-crawl" launched in July. In September, Cloudflare and Coinbase jointly established the x402 Foundation. A few days later, they announced the NET Dollar, a stablecoin for agent payments.

In other words, Cloudflare is both building walls and opening windows. It provides both blocking tools and paid access tools. They decide what stays out and what gets in, and under what conditions it enters. This position makes their next decision crucial.

NET Dollar is the True Signal

When Cloudflare announced the NET Dollar, they did not specify the issuer.

Although its x402 Foundation partner Coinbase publicly launched a service in December for businesses to issue branded stablecoins, they have yet to disclose it.

Then this week, The Information published a report further confirming the dynamic we’ve been discussing, which led to a surge in Cloudflare’s stock price. The report specifically mentioned that who will help Cloudflare launch the NET Dollar remains an open question, with "companies like Coinbase and ZeroHash" competing for the deal. This wording leaves room for other companies—such as Stripe.

Moreover, just after the release of MPP on Wednesday, Cloudflare immediately released an MPP proxy to accommodate this standard. This is not as strange as it seems—MPP also supports x402 payments, so it is not a completely independent standard. But they have yet to formally identify the stablecoin issuer, and the company that co-established the x402 Foundation with them is merely one of many companies vying for this deal, which undoubtedly raises questions.

This is important because the NET Dollar is intended to be the default currency for "pay-per-crawl" and other paid access services from Cloudflare. Whoever issues it will have their standard prioritized in Cloudflare's tech stack. If Coinbase issues the NET Dollar, Cloudflare will have reasons to build around x402. If Stripe issues it, MPP will gain the advantage. Considering Cloudflare handles one-fifth of internet traffic and is building infrastructure to intercept bot traffic and monetize it, this prioritization will determine what becomes the default standard across a significant portion of the internet.

The race between x402 and MPP is less important; what truly matters is who Cloudflare decides to partner with. That is the crux of the issue.

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