Cloudflare sits in the middle of a vast amount of web traffic now, offering easy global payments and skimming off the top of that is going to be very profitable potentially.
I don't trust Cloudflare, the larger they get the bigger the abuse potential becomes.
CF: No criminal convictions I know about. No reason to distrust yet. Most controversies seem to be about providing services to political organisations.
GCP: Earth Engine is quite good, but Google have multiple criminal convictions. As a repeat offender they should be avoided at all costs. They are just so exceptionally good at manipulating people, markets and academia it's genuinely terrifying.
Azure: Microsoft still don't take security seriously. They're just a bit bumbly, not really smart enough to be as terrifying as Google.
AWS: Pretty useful, annoying to use, distrust because I can't bear Amazon's use of dark patterns in consumer products.
Their customers pay them to be the front door to their websites. Customers want a way to reduce the massive traffic from AI crawling, to block malicious traffic, and to be compensated for access.
That leaves Cloudflare well positioned to implement a pay-for-access check along with all of the existing bot services they offer. AI crawling goes from a threat to a win if I can serve OpenAI a demand to pay for each request. Bot abuse goes down if traffic isn’t free. Businesses like journalism become stable again if readers pay for content rather than relying on advertisers to subsidize it.
But then why do a blockchain thing? Why not just make CloudflareBucks they centrally control? Surely that is much easier to monetize and cheaper to implement.
... which will then be immediately destroyed by law because it gives the actual tax man a single target, along with a money flow that comes from within the control of the tax man.
PLUS just imagine how many corrupt politicians will be tempted to force these payments to go through their company.
Their customers are hit the hardest by the shift away from google search to AI. They probably are the right company to try to help them monetize their content.
What does the traffic from Google Search look like though?
I can't imagine all the low effort content farms that were providing things like dictionary definitions or ridiculously elongated ad-stuffed versions of kitchen recipes are doing too hot under the pressure from AI Overviews. And they can't be the only ones impacted.
I agree this makes little sense for Cloudflare to jump on the crypto bandwagon now. Maybe they want to retain some talent by turning this into an official project.
Is the premise that it makes more sense for an AI agent to pay in prepurchased stablecoin tokens instead of direct access to a credit card?
They are the moat between AI content crawlers and websites. They will probably start charging a fee and a stablecoin is a good way to do that globally.
Cloudflare sits in the middle of a vast amount of web traffic now, offering easy global payments and skimming off the top of that is going to be very profitable potentially.
I don't trust Cloudflare, the larger they get the bigger the abuse potential becomes.