INTERVIEW: Cloudflare Needs 100M TPS from Crypto to Fix the Internet | CEO Matthew Prince
The internet is about to be flooded by machines, and
@eastdakota thinks the old business model is not ready. The
@Cloudflare co-founder and CEO joins Bankless to explain why AI agent traffic could overtake human traffic by 2027, how crawlers are changing the economics of content, why ads and subscriptions may not survive in their current form, and how x402, stablecoins, and pay-per-crawl could create a new payment layer for the web.
[TIMESTAMPS]
0:00 Intro
1:18 When AI Bot Traffic Overtakes Humans
4:19 What Cloudflare Actually Does
8:33 Life on the Internet’s “Ice Wall”
11:26 The Internet’s Business Model Problem
15:36 Google, Traffic, and the Attention Economy
22:49 AI Agents and the End of Ads
26:40 Why Faster Answers Can Still Hurt Creators
31:19 AI Companies as the Next YouTube or Netflix
36:11 Creating Scarcity for Content Markets
39:45 Content Independence Day
43:35 Should AI Agents Count as Human Users?
49:30 The Risks of Subscription-Only AI
53:36 A Golden Age of Content Creation?
57:58 Pay-Per-Crawl and x402
1:00:46 Why Stablecoins Matter
1:04:08 The Cloudflare Stablecoin Question
1:10:30 The Final Form of the Internet
1:13:52 The Park Record and Local Journalism
1:18:27 The Centralization Risk
1:23:24 Advice for Content Creators