[HN Gopher] Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin
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Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin
Author : holografix
Score : 82 points
Date : 2025-10-04 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cloudflare.com)
| kvam wrote:
| Why would cloudflare be the company to do this?
| Cupprum wrote:
| At least its not facebook or microsoft.
|
| But the better question would be, who should be the company (or
| entity) we should trust to do such a thing?
| unglaublich wrote:
| Because they are establishing themselves as "the gatekeeper of
| the internet".
| SXX wrote:
| MiTM is their business. Obviously mitming of financial
| transactions is the most profitable business of all.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| I dunno, running for president of the US and launching a
| crypto coin seems pretty profitable.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Rent seeking probably.
|
| Cloudflare sits in the middle of a vast amount of web traffic
| now, offering easy global payments and skimming off the top of
| that is going to be very profitable potentially.
|
| I don't trust Cloudflare, the larger they get the bigger the
| abuse potential becomes.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Curious: how do you feel about AWS, Azure, GCP?
| octo888 wrote:
| You work for Cloudflare, so is your comment more a "we're
| no different" statement than genuine curiosity about their
| opinion?
| rozenmd wrote:
| Genuinely curious.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Same way I do about any large corporation, I don't trust
| them.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| You mean Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet?
| willtemperley wrote:
| CF: No criminal convictions I know about. No reason to
| distrust yet. Most controversies seem to be about providing
| services to political organisations.
|
| GCP: Earth Engine is quite good, but Google have multiple
| criminal convictions. As a repeat offender they should be
| avoided at all costs. They are just so exceptionally good
| at manipulating people, markets and academia it's genuinely
| terrifying.
|
| Azure: Microsoft still don't take security seriously.
| They're just a bit bumbly, not really smart enough to be as
| terrifying as Google.
|
| AWS: Pretty useful, annoying to use, distrust because I
| can't bear Amazon's use of dark patterns in consumer
| products.
| deadbabe wrote:
| But of all the players, Cloudflare is the best one for this
| kind of thing.
| mapmeld wrote:
| I agree this makes little sense for Cloudflare to jump on the
| crypto bandwagon now. Maybe they want to retain some talent by
| turning this into an official project.
|
| Is the premise that it makes more sense for an AI agent to pay
| in prepurchased stablecoin tokens instead of direct access to a
| credit card?
| rjh29 wrote:
| They are the moat between AI content crawlers and websites.
| They will probably start charging a fee and a stablecoin is a
| good way to do that globally.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| So they can directly monetize page views with their own token
| and fully embrace the role of internet gatekeeper / tax man.
| spwa4 wrote:
| ... which will then be immediately destroyed by law because
| it gives the actual tax man a single target, along with a
| money flow that comes from within the control of the tax man.
|
| PLUS just imagine how many corrupt politicians will be
| tempted to force these payments to go through their company.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| rule of law no longer exists in the US and their large
| corporations are filling the gap.
| Spivak wrote:
| But then why do a blockchain thing? Why not just make
| CloudflareBucks they centrally control? Surely that is much
| easier to monetize and cheaper to implement.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Less regulation to get in the way of the blatant
| corruption.
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| Their customers are hit the hardest by the shift away from
| google search to AI. They probably are the right company to try
| to help them monetize their content.
| aiisthefiture wrote:
| Google search is used more now than ever...
| ACCount37 wrote:
| What does the traffic from Google Search look like though?
|
| I can't imagine all the low effort content farms that were
| providing things like dictionary definitions or
| ridiculously elongated ad-stuffed versions of kitchen
| recipes are doing too hot under the pressure from AI
| Overviews. And they can't be the only ones impacted.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Finally build an infrastructure for real micro transactions.
| First for AI agents to access paid content, then for consumer
| to access content.
| miohtama wrote:
| Because their customers want to monetize AI crawlers
| acdha wrote:
| Their customers pay them to be the front door to their
| websites. Customers want a way to reduce the massive traffic
| from AI crawling, to block malicious traffic, and to be
| compensated for access.
|
| That leaves Cloudflare well positioned to implement a pay-for-
| access check along with all of the existing bot services they
| offer. AI crawling goes from a threat to a win if I can serve
| OpenAI a demand to pay for each request. Bot abuse goes down if
| traffic isn't free. Businesses like journalism become stable
| again if readers pay for content rather than relying on
| advertisers to subsidize it.
| cluckindan wrote:
| "There's no bubble!"
| ares623 wrote:
| In the words of J Jonah Jameson: "You serious?"
| phartenfeller wrote:
| That's probably their strategy of handling 402 Payment
| Required[1]. They want to become the platform over which auctions
| for AI crawlers buying rights to use content take place.
|
| Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an even
| bigger giant.
|
| [1]
| https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Sta...
| Orochikaku wrote:
| English version of the docs[1] since the version linked above
| is in German.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Cloudflare only has a market cap of ~75 b. So there a plenty of
| bigger giants out there.
| thunfischbrot wrote:
| I am trying to understand the direction of your comment. It
| seems to respond to
|
| > Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an
| even bigger giant.
|
| Are you proposing that you do not share OPs sentiment, since
| there are larger companies?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| 2 sided.
|
| - Cloudflare is smaller in market cap than you would think,
| they are not "big tech" as to how I would consider it
|
| - have been them following for years and there is nothing
| atm. that would indicate of them being "evil"
| whatshisface wrote:
| Cloudflare is creating a massive single nexus for future
| corruption at the hands of an oppressive government or
| "active investors" to impact almost everyone.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| They would mean the end of US tech dominance globally.
|
| Azure, AWS, Meta and probably even Alphabet
| whatshisface wrote:
| Huh? Cloudflare is a Delaware company, same as the ones
| you listed.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Plenty of german companies supplied the nazis and
| survived ww2.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Scary if it works out their way and Cloudflare becomes an
| even bigger giant.
|
| As opposed to all the other giants. Clouflare is the only one
| with the heft to take on Google, AWS, Azure, etc.
| sssilver wrote:
| What is the conceptual difference between Cloudflare and the
| companies in that list? We all love a David vs Goliath story,
| but haven't we learned anything after buying the "Don't Be
| Evil" bullshit?
| bix6 wrote:
| There is no difference if you go and look at Cloudflares
| major shareholders.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| You could say the same for any company in the sp500.
| bix6 wrote:
| Correct and then in the private markets it's 5 big
| groups. Sounds like we have a problem here!
| jgalt212 wrote:
| They are taking on monopolists.
| miohtama wrote:
| Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not need
| user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine to
| machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work
| everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security
| profile is different (no credit card fraud)
|
| Of course Cloudflare is riding the stablecoin hype here a bit.
| At least they are large enough they might be pull this off
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Some the benefit of using stablecoins are 1) they do not
| need user accounts set up for payments, so easier for machine
| to machine (AI agent can manage its own money) 2) they work
| everywhere not just in credit card rich countries 3) security
| profile is different (no credit card fraud)
|
| Just to note, that Cloudflare is a public company which means
| that they have both internal and external auditors.
|
| They definitely need to worry about fraud, but the first two
| things they need to worry about are sanctions screening
| (don't do business with the four countries the US doesn't
| like) and AML (anti-money laundering).
|
| Stablecoins are a potentially huge vector for this kind of
| badness, so it would be unwise for Cloudflare to try to yolo
| this (but they probably will, because almost all tech
| companies try to work with finance this way).
| miohtama wrote:
| Stablecoins are well established now, having regulation
| both in the US and in the EU to address risks, including
| sanctions. They are used by several public companies
| including Stripe, PayPal and Shopify.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| > sanctions screening (don't do business with the four
| countries the US doesn't like)
|
| Not just countries; a changing list of organizations and
| individuals as well.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yes indeed this is clearly delineated in the GENIUS Act
| regulating Stablecoins:
|
| > Issuers would be subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, and
| the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) would
| be required to write tailored anti-money-laundering (AML)
| rules. S. 1582 would require that FinCEN facilitate
| "novel methods ... to detect illicit activity involving
| digital assets." S. 1582 would require issuers to certify
| that they have implemented AML and sanctions compliance
| programs. The bill would prohibit anyone who has been
| convicted of certain financial crimes of being an officer
| or director of an issuer.
|
| OFAC compliance is a regular thing in Internet companies.
| AWS and Cloudflare maintain blocklists designed to help
| other companies stay OFAC compliant and agree with US
| sanctions lists. These are all well-known.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Stablecoins are a potentially huge vector for this kind
| of badness, so it would be unwise for Cloudflare to try to
| yolo this (but they probably will, because almost all tech
| companies try to work with finance this way).
|
| Do you have any proof for this assertion or is it time to
| milk crypto cynicism for upvotes on this site again? The
| GENIUS Act (which regulates stablecoins) specifically calls
| out complying with AML and sanctions lists. So there's a
| clear regulatory regime.
| nucleative wrote:
| This reminded me of Gates' "The Road Ahead" book (late 90s if I
| recall) prediction that marketers would eventually be able to
| pay a dime to get an email in your inbox, if only the future
| economy could figure out micro-transactions.
|
| I agree with you that we're moving away from banner ads to some
| novel way of monetizing traffic, and therefore content
| published by authentic human beings.
| Razengan wrote:
| What if people could choose to donate their devices'
| computing power in return for some Netcoin or whatever?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| For those wondering, its a stablecoin. So you put in a dollar,
| you get back a dollar. This makes sense, especially for
| Cloudflare. It also makes a lot of sense to a degree, I don't
| imagine anyone trusting an AI to just hand over stablecoins for
| transactions.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| "So you put in a dollar, you get back a dollar."
|
| Until you don't.
|
| There are dozens of examples of failed stable coins, to the
| point that they are now a meme in the crypto community.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Sure, but this is a very well established firm, not some off-
| shoot crypto startup.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| lmao, never heard that before.
| TZubiri wrote:
| It's worth noting that there's nothing different between
| a stablecoin with a 1-to-1 ratio, and any entity that
| holds deposits. Like a bank Paypal, Stripe. Whether you
| call them Dollars or BrandDollars, if it has a 1to1
| ratio, it's actually a dollar.
|
| People are confused because they usually can't
| distinguish between net emission and gross emission, if
| you hold a deposit or a loan, you have increased the
| gross amount of dollars in the economy, but of course you
| have created an equivalent liability. There's no semantic
| or technical difference between loaning a dollar, holding
| a dollar in deposit, or issuing a dollar-equivalent
| token.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| This are zero details on how it's supposed to work, or how it
| avoids the problem traditional crypto. "Instant global
| transactions" sound good in theory, but it has never been a
| technological problem, purely a regulatory one. Govts. don't like
| this happening. They want oversight, especially for cross border
| transactions.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Every crypto project runs head first into this problem.
|
| Layers and layers of technical bullshit that never addresses
| the fact that no government in the world wants to allow
| frictionless peer to peer payments across borders.
|
| CF is likely building this to service an internal need to
| collect micropayments for some kind of pay to view "captcha",
| and all the rest is just highly paid PR spin.
| garbthetill wrote:
| regulation from the US side sounds open with the genius act,
| plus the current admin is pro crypto. Regulations from other
| govs dont matter as they will just "geo block" countries that
| dont allow it and users will just bounce into the service with
| a vpn or proxy at their own risk, other crypto like btc , xrp
| has been used to cross border trade for a decade now even in
| countries with outright bans, the entities using it just work
| around it e.g have an operation in a country were its allowed
| or in the case of weak enforcement just dont care
|
| Im not fully knowledgeable about banks, but i always thought
| the reason why regulation was so hard was because no one could
| agree on a common ground obvs each country wants to keep their
| moat with their own currency, but with crypto anyone can opt in
| at their own risk
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Current US admin is pro grift, bribery, and embezzlement.
|
| Crypto is a just a tool that enables that. They have no
| interest whatsoever in democratization, self-custodial
| finance, or frictionless payments across borders for anyone
| but themselves.
|
| Direct p2p payments a "hard problem" because it directly
| contradicts what we consider to be one of the central pillars
| of national sovereignty, control over your national currency.
|
| Crypto as a whole is in denial about this because there is no
| path forward without expecting nations to either give up one
| of their most effective levers of control, or expecting them
| to turn a blind eye to external actors eroding that control
| in real time.
| lifty wrote:
| [flagged]
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Your question is unclear.
|
| Denial about what national sovereignty means in regards
| to currency controls and what that means for crypto orgs
| who want to operate in the stable coin or off ramp space?
|
| Plenty of examples of orgs either failing or entirely
| abandoning their crypto "principles" like privacy and
| decentralization just to get rubber stamped by various
| regulatory agencies.
| lifty wrote:
| Nobody is in denial about the politics and game theory of
| adoption.
|
| It seems you are in denial about the rate of crypto rails
| adoption. Stable coins seem to be part of the US national
| strategy for creating some extra demand for US debt so
| this goes fully against your previous comment.
| Decentralized debt markets are growing. Wall Street is
| dipping its toes more and more in tokenization and more
| and more organizations are interested in that. That list
| goes on.
|
| It's frankly tiring to debate this on HN. The fact is,
| blockchains are just a technology so they are adopted in
| all sorts of of ways which sometimes align with
| decentralization ethos and sometimes not. Ethereum and
| Bitcoin seems to be getting more adoption, as bearer
| assets that are independent and have a predictable
| issuance rate, and in a world with so much debt they can
| only continue to gain more market share.
|
| So I really don't know where you're coming from.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Clinging to unfounded beliefs about a fundamentally
| flawed ideology is exhausting.
| lifty wrote:
| What is that fundamentally flawed ideology?
| garbthetill wrote:
| I agree on the current admin being pro grift and just
| extracting as much as they can, but crypto works because it
| overwhelms the system, if a million people rushed a
| military base at the same time no matter how great the
| defense is, the base will be breached.
|
| I dont have financial/economic knowledge to argue my point
| to a full extent, but ive been under the assumption that
| p2p payments was only hard because various countries could
| not find a common ground, not only because of keeping
| control , but also getting laws changed/passed in most
| democratic nations is hard and might not be worth the
| scrutiny, entities in charge of their country banking
| system and regulations also find it difficult to bring
| radical ideas
|
| There has been a handful of items that have bypassed all of
| this way before crypto and that is precious metals & gem
| stones like gold, silver, ruby, emerald etc you could be in
| the middle of africa and you will find someone who will
| easily buy your gold. Crypto is just like this and instead
| of mother nature dictating for us what material is rare ,
| we as the consumers decide which crypto protocol, dapp,
| token ,blockchain etc to use and with competiton a better
| or improved system will always arise and trading gold hasnt
| eroded control for most nations, people still want hard
| cash for their day to day.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| I will gladly send you crypto for any gold you can get
| your hands on.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > what we consider to be one of the central pillars of
| national sovereignty, control over your national currency.
|
| Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a lot
| of (sovereign) countries in the world. Probably the most
| famous example being the Euro, and maybe the closest
| example to you is the United States Dollar which is an
| official currency in countries that have no control over
| the currency itself.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Not in the mood to debate easily google-able concepts.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_sovereignty
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a
| lot of (sovereign) countries in the world.
|
| The CEO of coinbase recently said on a podcast that in
| the future, he expects stablecoins to wipe out all but
| ten currencies in the world.
|
| This is a ludicrous statement that's gonna get Coinbase
| banned from many of these countries, and end up being
| subject to much, much more regulation than they expect.
|
| Like, just because the US is currently pro-crypto doesn't
| mean that the rest of the global regulators have changed.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| .... Why would Coinbase be banned for saying something
| like this, what? At most these countries will probably
| prevent their citizens from using cryptocurrency like the
| Chinese government's position. Though my guess is that
| some smaller countries with less sophisticated monetary
| regimes may actually be excited about escaping the
| petrodollar world economy.
| dpc_01234 wrote:
| The coins can be just registered to an id. I don't like these,
| but tech like GNU Teller already enable it even with decent
| privacy.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| Well time to move my DNS off of CF again.
| kleene_op wrote:
| [flagged]
| randerson wrote:
| I'd actually prefer spending a few pennies to read an article
| vs. the status quo of being inundated with ads and trackers.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| This argument is the endgame of the chef slowly boiling the
| frog.
| swarnie wrote:
| Big business: Why not both?
| lifty wrote:
| Isn't that better than advertising? Of course, there's the
| cognitive burden of micro payments
| (https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-mental-
| accounting-...) so not sure it will catch on. But for agents it
| might.
| spwa4 wrote:
| No. It isn't. Here's what happened to all the micropayments
| network platforms that competed with the internet:
|
| The gatekeepers (telecoms) first decided they were going to
| publish things themselves too, which had zero success, then
| to pay themselves more than anyone on the platform, then when
| that still didn't work they kicked everyone else off the
| platform with various excuses (porn, crime, getting money
| from outside the platform, promoting non-sanctioned shows,
| ... the big thing that was successful were mail and
| chatrooms)
|
| The problem is that these companies were always willing
| (after a short while) to damage the economics of the
| infrastructure as a whole, just to increase their own share
| (for example per-email charges). Eventually they had close to
| 100% ... of nothing.
|
| And the irony is that because of these companies constantly
| trying to move into content and apps, destroying their own
| system more and more by crude attempts to force people into
| their content the only thing that remains of these systems
| ... is publishers. They couldn't really improve their apps,
| since that cost them money. They quickly discovered to use
| money as a way to avoid friction on their apps ... and then
| no business leader ever approved removing friction anywhere.
|
| For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL
| polotics wrote:
| I can vouch for this fact: an hallucinatory moment when a
| manager defended the logic of pay-per-email...
| vasco wrote:
| > Business agents could be instructed to pay suppliers when a
| delivery is confirmed.
|
| What could go wrong?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The consensus on HN is that "if you are not paying, you are the
| product". Now you'll pay, and you'll not be the product
| anymore. Right?
| raspyberr wrote:
| Look up how logical implication works
| andrepd wrote:
| Grimmer than paying with your soul? With targeting kids with
| ads for gambling, ultra-rightwing podcssters, and fucked up
| sexual content? I find it hard to believe.
| pwlm wrote:
| I built five different apps that pay-per-use with
| microtransactions and users were uninterested. The key reason I
| think is, and something one user stated to me explicitly, is
| that microtransactions change interactions from a social gratis
| model to a business transaction.
| viraptor wrote:
| At least they could've used one of the many existing systems...
| Brave attention token for example is right there and there's a
| few other similar projects. They didn't even acknowledge
| alternative efforts.
| garbthetill wrote:
| ik alot of people on here hate crypto, tether has been making
| billions each quarter for the last few years. I dont think
| there's any more real thought to this, than the genius act
| providing a framework and cf trying to get easy money
|
| The genius act will change how fintech and neobanks operate, so
| expect to see more companies offering similar services
| dpc_01234 wrote:
| Average HN commenter is a solid counter signal for investors.
| Kind of like Cramer just for tech.
| Orochikaku wrote:
| Could someone perhaps provide a steelman argument for this? My
| own personal read on this is really cynical...
|
| As per NIST's recommendations[1] it seems like a blockchain
| doesn't make sense for this use case.
|
| From where I stand it seems like Cloudflare is side-stepping the
| scrutiny, regulations and perhaps most pertinently the cost that
| would govern a similar offering using traditional financial
| instruments.
|
| [1] https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-
| distribut...
| factorialboy wrote:
| The only good thing about Blockchain today is Bitcoin's
| scarcity.
|
| Almost every other project out there would be better off as a
| centralized project -- heck, many of them are centralized,
| while claiming to hold on to the decentralized cyberpunk ethos
| -- if not being outright scams.
| Orochikaku wrote:
| I've personally found one compelling use case, decentralised
| DNS, I'm sure there are other projects attempting this but
| the one I'm familiar with is Namecoin[1]
|
| [1] https://www.namecoin.org/
| ameliaquining wrote:
| Namecoin would make sense on a technical level if anyone
| were actually using it, but nobody is.
| thrown-0825-1 wrote:
| ENS has existed for a while and has very little traction.
| pstuart wrote:
| I'm working on a project that is based on blockchain for the
| key purpose of making the data on it effectively available to
| all to add to and to consume -- basically providing a public
| utility for the data hosting.
|
| It's not a path to riches (I can see a possible lifestyle
| business out of it), it's about giving people new
| opportunities.
|
| I've been chewing on this for years and only now that Claude
| has shown up do I have a partner to help me make this work.
|
| I do have some experience working on blockchain for a startup
| (non-ICO) that helped inspire me, but the experience itself
| bordered on being PTSD-inducing. The people I worked with
| were True Believers of Crypto, but the product we were
| building used crypto solely to tell their investors it was a
| blockchain company -- not that their product leveraged it _at
| all_.
| pelorat wrote:
| Good luck with the regulatory process in Europe. Cloudflare is
| going to have to register as a financial institution. There's no
| way they will be able to roll this out globally.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| For some reason, I thought this was an off-season April fools
| joke.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45380382
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