Written by: David Christopher
Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News
The debate between x402 and MPP is misguided. The real question is: Who will Cloudflare choose to issue the NET Dollar stablecoin?
Recently, Stripe launched the MPP (Machine Payable Protocol) as the flagship product for the Tempo mainnet launch.
A brief introduction: Tempo is an EVM-compatible blockchain focused on payments, built by former Paradigm employees and former Ethereum core developers. MPP is an HTTP-based open protocol for payments between agents and machines. It revives the long-dormant HTTP 402 status code (Payment Required), similar to x402 but with a different architectural philosophy.
The core trade-off between the two protocols is straightforward: x402 prioritizes openness; MPP offers better integration with existing payment systems, but at the cost of being tied to the Stripe ecosystem.
Rather than continuing to argue over these technical details, it's more productive to look at another dimension. At this stage, debating whether MPP or x402 is technically superior is not very meaningful. Beneath the surface, a more important and influential game is being played: Coinbase and Stripe are competing for a partnership with the third-party giant Cloudflare. Cloudflare's choice will significantly impact which standard becomes the industry mainstream.
Bots Destroyed the Old Model
Before we continue, let's reiterate the core problem that agent payments aim to solve: AI agents have made web scraping too easy.
From 2024 to 2025, Wikipedia's traffic surged by 50% due to bots, putting immense pressure on servers and skyrocketing costs. At least 65% of its high-consumption requests came from bots. In February 2025, the image website DiscoverLife was bombarded with millions of scraping requests daily, nearly paralyzing the site. In August, cloud service provider Fastly reported that a bot was making requests to a website at a rate of 39,000 times per minute. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) faced a similar situation, calling this wave of bot activity "functionally equivalent to a denial-of-service attack." On a single day in November, its traffic surged 968% year-over-year.
Although websites added robots.txt rules (telling crawlers what can and cannot be scraped), over 13% of crawlers simply ignore these rules. They overwhelm servers, putting immense pressure on websites that rely on donations to operate.
Commercial websites were not spared either: Reddit tightened its request rate limits; eight of the world's top ten news websites now block bots used for training; overall, 71% of major content platforms completely block retrieval crawlers.
Trend of Daily Website Requests from AI Bots
But the internet isn't completely locked down. Websites offering high-value, time-sensitive data (prices, hotel bookings, professional datasets) have started charging for data access. General, low-value content can still be scraped for free via caches or proxies. Bots aren't going away, but the internet is splitting into: free content and paid content. This is precisely why x402 and MPP emerged.
As Ethos Network founder Serpin said: "This bot trend means the internet will change: more closed websites, more CAPTCHAs, more separation of human and machine traffic."
Cloudflare is in a Key Position
Cloudflare is the middle layer between websites and visitors: protecting against attacks, accelerating loading, and handling massive traffic. About 20% of the world's websites use it, making it one of the most critical hubs on the internet. Any decision Cloudflare makes regarding traffic rules affects one-fifth of the internet.
This also means that Cloudflare is most directly feeling the pressure from the surge in bot traffic and the proliferation of crawlers, and is actively working on solutions.
Initially, it simply offered websites the ability to block all bots. Last year, Cloudflare launched "Pay for Crawl": websites don't have to block bots outright but can instead charge AI crawlers a small fee. When a bot accesses a page, it either pays for access or receives a 402 "Payment Required" response. Billing is handled by Cloudflare. This is a middle ground between "complete ban" and "completely free."
After launching Pay for Crawl in July, Cloudflare co-founded the x402 Foundation with Coinbase in September. Days later, they announced the NET Dollar—a stablecoin for agent payments.
In other words: Cloudflare is both building the "wall" (blocking) and opening the "window" (paid access). It decides who gets turned away, who gets in, and under what conditions. It is this position that makes its next choice so crucial.
NET Dollar is the Real Signal
When Cloudflare announced the NET Dollar, it did not reveal the issuer. Even though its partner Coinbase publicly launched enterprise custom stablecoin issuance services in December, Cloudflare has yet to make an official announcement.
A report this week by The Information made the situation clearer: Who Cloudflare will partner with to issue the NET Dollar is still undecided. Companies like Coinbase and ZeroHash are vying for the deal, leaving room for others (like Stripe).
More notably: Right after MPP was released on Wednesday, Cloudflare immediately launched an MPP-compatible proxy. This isn't surprising, as MPP also supports x402 payments; the two are not entirely opposing standards. But the problem is: Cloudflare has not finalized the stablecoin issuer, and Coinbase, which once co-founded the x402 Foundation with it, is just one of many bidders.
Why is this important? Because the NET Dollar will become the default currency for Cloudflare's "Pay for Crawl" and other paid access services. Whoever is responsible for issuing it will see their corresponding payment standard prioritized within the Cloudflare system.
- If Coinbase issues the NET Dollar → Cloudflare will continue building around x402
- If Stripe issues it → MPP will receive a huge boost
Considering Cloudflare covers one-fifth of the world's websites and is building a "block + pay" system for bot traffic, its choice will directly determine which protocol becomes the mainstream standard for 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.
