Cloudflare Needs 100M TPS from Crypto to Fix the Internet | CEO Matthew Prince

Bankless

Tech News, Technology, News

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2026

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The internet is about to be flooded by machines, and Matthew Prince 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. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🟦 COINBASE ONE | MEMBER MONTH https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:18 When AI Bot Traffic Overtakes Humans 4:19 What Cloudflare Actually Does 10:40 Life on the Internet’s “Ice Wall” 13:33 The Internet’s Business Model Problem 17:43 Google, Traffic, and the Attention Economy 24:56 AI Agents and the End of Ads 28:47 Why Faster Answers Can Still Hurt Creators 33:26 AI Companies as the Next YouTube or Netflix 38:18 Creating Scarcity for Content Markets 41:52 Content Independence Day 45:24 Should AI Agents Count as Human Users? 51:37 The Risks of Subscription-Only AI 57:24 A Golden Age of Content Creation? 1:01:46 Pay-Per-Crawl and x402 1:04:34 Why Stablecoins Matter 1:07:56 The Cloudflare Stablecoin Question 1:14:18 The Final Form of the Internet 1:17:40 The Park Record and Local Journalism 1:22:16 The Centralization Risk 1:27:12 Advice for Content Creators --- RESOURCES Matthew Prince https://x.com/eastdakota --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	The internet for a long time is growing like crazy.
0:02.7	And then it kind of stalled out for the last little bit.
0:05.8	And the number of like new websites that were being created,
0:07.7	a number of new domains kind of plateaued from about 2012, 2012 until actually quite recently.
0:14.7	What's changed is I think that because a lot of these tools have allowed more people to be creators,
0:21.3	to be, you know, coders, to be developers, they actually for the first time in really the last 15 years,
0:27.1	the number of websites that are being created, the number of new things that are happening
0:30.5	is actually is actually growing again and growing at rates that look like what the early
0:35.4	2000s growth rates of the internet look like.
0:37.7	So I actually think that's kind of optimistic,
0:39.3	that there's more things that are being created
0:42.2	that are out there and are coming online.
0:48.8	Bankless Nation, very excited to introduce you to Matthew Prince.
0:51.2	He's the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
0:53.5	That's a $70 billion
0:54.5	company that sits between the internet and roughly 20% of the world's websites run on top
1:01.1	of Cloudflare. I think he's one of the most thoughtful voices on the question of how is the
1:06.6	business model of the internet changing? He's also recently joined X402, got some stablecoin stuff
1:12.6	to talk about. Matthew, there's so much to discuss today. Welcome to Bankless. Thank you for having me.
1:18.7	So we've seen estimates that at a certain year, AI bot traffic is going to exceed all human
1:24.5	traffic on the internet. I don't know if that's 2027, 2028,
1:28.6	2029, or maybe even this year. When do you think that happens and is the internet ready for it?
	...

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