Cloudflare has announced plans to introduce NET Dollar, a new U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin that will enable instant, secure transactions for the agentic web. NET Dollar will help power a new business model for the Internet that rewards originality, sustains creativity, and enables innovation in an AI-driven world.
AI is fundamentally changing how humans interact with the web. Instead of driving every interaction themselves, humans are beginning to delegate tasks to autonomous AI agents to book a flight, order groceries, manage calendars and more. For this to happen, the underlying financial system will also need to evolve. The AI-driven Internet will need money that is instant, global, and secure so that AI agents, developers, and creators can transact instantly, automatically, and reliably.
“For decades, the business model of the Internet ran on ad platforms and bank transfers. The Internet’s next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions—tools that shift incentives toward original, creative content that actually adds value,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “By using our global network, we are going to help modernize the financial rails needed to move money at the speed of the Internet, helping to create a more open and valuable Internet for everyone.”
Building an Open, Sustainable Internet Economy with NET Dollar
Cloudflare has been a global company from day one, helping customers around the world to accelerate performance, secure websites and networks, and develop and deploy applications. Now, Cloudflare aims to do this with transactions, offering an Internet-native payment system that is fast, secure, and globally accessible. Stablecoin is one of many tools that, alongside existing financial systems, can help the AI-driven Internet thrive, with speed, trust, and interoperability.
NET Dollar will help modernize the payment ecosystem for the future of the agentic web by:
- Making payments easy anywhere in the world: Agents will need systems to enable payments that are not only fast and secure, but also trusted, recorded transparently, and executed reliably at a global scale – across currencies, geographies, and time zones.
- Enabling instant, automated transactions: Personal agents will be able to take instant, programmatic actions like paying for the cheapest flight, or ordering an item the moment it goes on sale. Business agents could be instructed to pay suppliers when a delivery is confirmed.
- Unlocking a new business model for the Internet: NET Dollar will enable creators to be rewarded for unique and original content, developers to easily monetize APIs and applications, and AI companies to contribute back to the ecosystem that fuels them by compensating content sources fairly.
