Is this a sensible way to use cryptocurrencies?

We’re all familiar with error code 404, the one that appears when we type in an incorrect or non-existent web address. It is not the only code of this type, of course: in the 1990s, the architects of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) created many such codes, including code 402, which was associated with the message ‘Payment Required’. Just as 404 was used to indicate an incorrect address, 402 was intended to indicate one that was accessible only upon payment.

The code in question never gained widespread use because the development of the web followed a different philosophy, one based on free access and freedom of access. In recent years, however, things have changed: first, paywalls were introduced, making more and more news sites accessible only by subscription; then came Substack, with its paid newsletters; finally, from 2022, artificial intelligence has completely overturned the business model that had been the norm for decades. 

Historically, in fact, the web and its sustenance have always been based on attention. Even before social media, websites and blogs made money by selling adverts – and thus attracting clicks and views, even through intrusive practices such as clickbait. Today, however, AI models and agents can effectively read the web and provide users with answers directly, without them having to open links and generate views for other sites. Google itself, after all, behaves more like a chatbot than a search engine. It is against this backdrop that Monetisation Gateway was launched, a service offered by Cloudflare designed specifically to monetise the web in a different way, in light of the rise of AI. Cloudflare is the company that manages a large part of the online content delivery infrastructure: it works to make the delivery of websites faster and more secure, acting as an intermediary between a site’s visitors and the server hosting it. From this privileged position, the company has witnessed first-hand the impact of bots and AI agents on web traffic, which, according to its own findings, now consists of less than half human visits. The rest are bots and crawlers: automated programmes run by all manner of organisations to search for information online.

In this new model, accessing a website does not cost one euro or ten cents. Underpinning the whole system are microtransactions – that is, exchanges of minuscule amounts – for which cryptocurrencies, which can be divided into very small denominations, prove useful. In particular, stablecoins – cryptocurrencies whose value is pegged to that of the dollar, and are therefore less subject to speculative fluctuations. The mechanism devised by Cloudflare covers both instances where an AI consults a website to answer a query and those where content is used to train the models. On the more technical side, Cloudflare has stated that it will rely on an open standard called x402 (named after the old HTML code) and already supported by organisations such as Amazon Web Services, Coinbase, Google, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa. To summarise, the idea behind this new feature is as follows: an AI agent arrives at your web page, finds out the price for accessing the page, pays in cryptocurrency and leaves.

At the heart of Monetisation Gateway lies a radical rethinking of the web and our relationship with individual websites. In a future where chatbots read the web on our behalf and AI agents can navigate and interact with it, clicks and readership figures matter little: the new unit of measurement is the token, the computational unit with which language models process information. The more tokens an AI uses to read and process a website, the higher the payment required: to give an idea, writing, editing and proofreading a short essay requires around 10,000 tokens; other tasks, such as creating a website or analysing a database, consume even more. To demonstrate that it means business, Cloudflare has set a date – 15 September 2026 – from which the new system will come into effect; or rather, the default settings for new users of the service will include the Monetisation Gateway. It will, of course, be possible to change the default settings and disable the feature, but the idea is that this will be the new normal. After thirty years of a free web for everyone, perhaps things are about to change.