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
