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Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar
- bigyabai 1y agoHooray! More coinslop!
- margalabargala 1y agoNow with AI!
- chews 1y agothis coinslop means less bankslop which is actually an improvement, they're undoubtedly baking their "dollar" with tbills and they get to make 4 percent on every dollar transacted with no counterparty risk besides the full faith and credit of the US Government.
- margalabargala 1y ago> means less bankslop which is actually an improvement Why is the standard tied directly a single for profit company an improvement to the system that isn't tied to any specific wntity and anyone can use?
- bigyabai 1y agoPresumably because it's really super duper convenient for the single for-profit entity that possesses an outstanding majority of the minted coinage. Woohoo! I freaking love coinslop!
- chews 1y agoyay for coinslop! transparent usage of currency by robots... no way is it better than a bunch of rolled up swift transfers/wires..... coinslop not routed through the bankslop rail is still an improvement.
- margalabargala 1y ago> no way is it better than a bunch of rolled up swift transfers/wires I non-sarcastically agree. What's wrong with same day ACH? The risk of having the money be not in a FDIC bank makes this a nonstarter.
- codezero 1y agoHow much of it is insured?
- wslh 1y agoCircle (USDC/$CRCL) down [1]. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRCL/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRCL/
- seany 1y agoThis is only really interesting if you can use it with out KYC
- actionfromafar 1y agoFinally AI can buy flights for me! /s
- zb3 1y agoCrypto again? Wow, that's horrible.. But at least maybe that will rightfully discourage companies from using it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aetherspawn 1y agoIs US dollar backed a good thing? At this point we should be backing things on gold, platinum. The Australian dollar has gone up about 20% vs the American dollar since Trump.
- cj 1y agoA basket of currencies and value stores seems like it would be the least volatile.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> basket of currencies and value stores seems like it would be the least volatile For whom? The least volatile asset relative to dollars are dollars. The moment you start building a money-market fund you have novel risks, from credit to rates and FX. (And, in the extreme, legal.)
- cj 1y ago> For whom For people outside of the US.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> For people outside of the US They’re better off with their own currency or an international currency (currently, Euros or dollars). Almost never a basket. (The IMF has SDRs. And various trade-weighted baskets are constructed for metric purposes. They aren’t practical instruments.)
- dboreham 1y agoIf you don't hold it as an investment it doesn't matter.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Australian dollar has gone up about 20% vs the American dollar since Trump Which makes it garbage for transacting if you’re paid in or pay with any other currency. Modern currencies split their store of value and medium of exchange components. Stablecoins (and credit cards and checking accounts) seize on the latter. Bitcoins (and Treasuries and money-market funds) the former.
- fooqux 1y agoI actually had to double check it wasn't April 1st.
- ilaksh 1y ago"Rules, triggers, and workflows can be embedded directly into payments, making them smarter and adaptable." -- are they smart contracts? What kind of workflows? Does the workflow involve sending messages to agents or making HTTP requests?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Does the workflow involve sending messages to agents or making HTTP requests? It looks like it will be an API for agents [1]. [1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/announcing-agents-to-payments-ap2-protocol https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...
- 1gn15 1y agoAh, I see their end goal here. You can either use a full browser to download data from websites (which is what most people will still do), but they provide a temptation to just pay CloudFlare to bypass their Turnstile (which corporations might go for, then they'll probably try to expand this to the average person too). Basically, "pay to bypass our CAPTCHA!".
- jsheard 1y agoThey're calling this a stablecoin but AFAICT there's no direct mention of blockchains or decentralization or anything else along those lines, have we wrapped all the way around to using crypto nomenclature to talk about plain old centralized ledgers? Not that I'd complain about one less pointless blockchain in the world, it's just funny.
- lomase 1y agoBlockchain is not hype anymore, I bet they talk about AI or LLMs. Edit: I was not wrong.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoThe product page [1] is the most vaporware-y that I’ve seen in a while. That said, they’re emphasising speed. (“Instant.”) That seems to preclude using a major, public blockchain. (On the other hand, they don’t talk up privacy.) [1] https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/ https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/
- wmf 1y agoIf you define instant as less than half a second then Solana, Avalanche, and various L2s are instant.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> If you define instant as less than half a second then Solana, Avalanche, and various L2s are instant I suppose. I don’t see why Cloudflare would want to give up that sort of control. The advantage they bring to the table is they’re a trusted brand per se.
- wmf 1y agoSince most existing blockchains are open source they can just create their own Flarechain™ based on existing code. This would give them de facto control but also the appearance of decentralization at the same time. My point is that it's technologically possible.
- lomase 1y agoThis is the end of what we know as Internet isnt it?
- wmf 1y agoThey're calling it a New Internet Business Model https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-2025-annual-founders-letter/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-2025-annual-founders-... discussed the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599
- IgorPartola 1y agoHoly buzzwords Batman. But I am sure this will really be the crypto coin to power the internet’s transactions. All the previous ones got it wrong, this is the solution. /s Instead of this, we need a central bank that can provide everyone with a direct account to stop all the banking speculation. That’s the instant transactions I want.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> we need a central bank that can provide everyone with a direct account to stop all the banking speculation. That’s the instant transactions I want Hard nope from me post Trump. We don’t need the President having potentially unregulated and direct visibility into and access to every American’s bank account. (And no, it’s not currently the case. The FBI still has to e.g. request records, a process which creates friction and the potential for pushback or whistleblowing.)
- IgorPartola 1y agoI hear you on Trump but note that POTUS has full access to the IRS records. Except he doesn’t and that is an official executive branch agency, unlike the Fed. Besides, ideally you’d be able to get a foreign central bank account too.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> note that POTUS has full access to the IRS records. Except he doesn’t He hasn’t asked for it. I strongly doubt if he can control the Fed and FTC that the IRS will somehow be a red line. > ideally you’d be able to get a foreign central bank account too Oh goodie, what I need in my life is the CCP being able to blackmail me.
- IgorPartola 1y agoI mean don’t open an account in China? And this doesn’t preclude private banking. You can pay a private bank to manage your money, just that you also have a public option. I don’t really want to go down a full political rabbit hole but Trump can ask for whatever he wants. If you look at all the cases in the federal courts currently they all are basically figuring out just how much of what he has tried is actually legal and mostly finding that very little of it is. As a result you’ll see headlines like “Trump requests JumpCrisscross’s medical records and bank statements” on the front page of CNN but you won’t see the headline on page six that reads “Trump appointed judge laughed the FBI’s lawyers out of the court room for making a stupid request.”
- neilv 1y agoThe name "NET Dollar" matches their ticker symbol, "NET".
- paxys 1y agoI have found that grand announcements like these that aren't accompanied by "you can use this for <major use case> starting today" are likely not going to amount to much.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoDoes Cloudflare have a history of bullshit announcements? (Serious question.)
- paxys 1y agoIt doesn't have to be "bullshit", in the sense that it can be working tech. The question is - who will use it, and why? Being such a large company and major player in the space why don't they have launch partners lined up and ready to go?
- itake 1y agohttps://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tv-as-a-service/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tv-as-a-service/ Idk what this is
- neilv 1y agoAnyone know whether they already have approval of the current US executive administration? (Which might smooth the regulatory challenges.)
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Anyone know whether they already have approval No indication they have. “Stablecoins could be issued by banks and credit unions (through subsidiaries) or nonbanks. Nonbanks would be restricted to financial firms unless the Treasury Secretary and chairs of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)—referred to as the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee (SCRC)—unanimously find they do not pose risks to the banking or financial system and will comply with certain requirements.” https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12553 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12553
- paxys 1y agoStablecoins are already a thing. Hundreds of them are circulating legally in the US. So I doubt this will need new approval.
- taspeotis 1y agoMake it stop
- PedroBatista 1y agoCloudflare is living that mid 00's Google vibe mixed with AWS mind.. No need to be totally cynic to kinda know how this will play out..
- mmaunder 1y agoI'm assuming the stablecoin market cap shows up on the balance sheet which is a nice way to goose the ratios.
- wmf 1y agoIt shows up as an asset and liability so they cancel out. They do get to keep the interest though.
- nickysielicki 1y agoDear whiners: the reason the internet sucks today is because this didn’t already exist. Do you know why Reddit did their horrible redesign and locked down their apps? It wasn’t because you didn’t complain loudly enough, it was because their shareholders were concerned about losing out on profits from data scraping AI companies. Do you know why Twitter can’t be read without logging in? It’s because their shareholders were concerned about losing out on profits from data scraping AI companies. Do you know why you don’t click Quora links? Because they don’t serve you useful results, because they’re concerned about losing profits from data scraping AI companies. Do you see the pattern here? The open internet died a very long time ago. It’s been dead for years. It’s not coming back unless we figure out a way to make shareholders happy. Paying these companies for the content they host is how that happens.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- meander_water 1y ago> The Internet’s next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions—tools that shift incentives toward original, creative content that actually adds value I don't understand this. How is pay per use and paywalling content going to incentivize the creation of original content? If anything, people are more incentivized to create low quality, generic content because they're not directly accessible by humans.
- wmf 1y agoCloudflare's plan does assume that AI crawlers and deep research agents can tell quality content from slop before they pay for it. If the AIs just pay for anything I agree with you.
- BoredPositron 1y agoThey want to reinvent flattr but this time on the blockchain.
- growthwtf 1y agoYou all need to stop being so pessimistic. This is a great idea. Want PBS to stick around? Make it so anybody who's sticking on chat GPT gets great answers from PBS and every time ChatGPT scrapes it, PBS gets money. Is it extremely difficult? Obviously. Will it work? Probably not, very few things do. Is it a great thing that some folks are doing it and trying to make it work so that we can have a functional media ecosystem in a post-social-media age? Absolutely.
- apothegm 1y agoI assume this is for people who don’t want their sites crawled and ingested for AI training. With the goal of making it cost-prohibitive to do so. Of course, one side effect will be crippling search engines as well. Maybe less important for driving traffic in the social media era?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wmf 1y agoPeople are trying to separate search crawling from AI crawling but Google is strongly resisting. I don't know how it will play out.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agohttps://netdollar.cloudflare.com/ https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/
- nkotov 1y agoSo Cloudflare is establishing themselves as the toll station for the internet.
- joquarky 1y agoWhat proportion of websites do they need to gatekeep before the label applies?
- Kuncle 1y agoWhich chain, BASE?
- fwota 1y agoIt's an interesting move from Cloudflare, and entirely rational from their point of view. They need to deal with a coming tidal wave of agentic bot traffic, and one expedient way to do this is erect a toll booth that forces agents to identify, whitelist, and/or pay for access. I wrote up more detailed thoughts here: https://www.pberg.com/blog/2025/09/25/cloudflares-agentic-toll-booth/ https://www.pberg.com/blog/2025/09/25/cloudflares-agentic-to...
- Jommi 1y agoBasically they will become the toll-lords of the internet. And because of that, THEY can choose what they accept as payment. A stablecoin (probably just run by them but technology coming from one of the stablecoin providers like Paxos) is perfect for this, as it will be regulated and akin to a digital dollar, with the addition that they can earn yield on treasury bills at the same time. Pretty smart.
- ricardonunez 1y agoCloudflare had a busy birthday week.