Cloudflare released something a few days ago called Monetization Gateway. This is a business model that only exists in the AI era, and I'm afraid this is what Web3 really looks like. Not because it overturns. It trapped a broken matter that everyone had been chatting about for many years and couldn't bring down in a particularly dirty and tiring way. Simply put, in the future, if AI wants to read your web pages, access your API, and use your tools without registering or receiving keys, it may directly deduct a sum of money, which will automatically be deposited into your wallet. Why couldn't this be done before? Two old obstacles. One is the payment channel. Traditional channels cannot handle transactions of less than a few cents, and charging a fee of 1 cent may result in higher channel fees and slower payment. Below a certain amount, the amount spent on receiving this money is more than the money itself. Another requirement is that the billing system needs to call APIs. If you want to receive payment based on quantity, you need to transform yourself into half a payment company, with a complete set of usage tracking, billing, and reconciliation. The cost of backend transformation is high. So most companies choose the more convenient option of charging by seat. Cloudflare's solution this time is to stuff the payment into a regular HTTP request. It used a 402 status code (Payment Required) that almost no one uses. AI sends a request, and the server responds with a request to pay, quoting 1 cent and paying in USDC to this address. The AI Agent's built-in wallet automatically pays, and the payment voucher is attached to the request and resent. A role called facilitator in the middle verifies that the money has indeed been paid, and once approved, it is released. Like a subway toll free gate. Once the card is attached, it will be released after deducting the fee, without having to pull out your wallet or redirect to the checkout counter. The money is in stablecoins, such as USDC. Instant payment, ≈ 0 handling fee, no chargeback. The x402 protocol is not exclusively owned by Cloudflare. The earliest reference implementation came from Coinbase, and now it is affiliated with the x402 Foundation of the Linux Foundation, with over 25 industry partners working together. At this point, it appears to be a product where webmasters make money. But in my eyes, this is a crucial leap in Cloudflare's business model, and we need to take a deeper look.