Cloudflare Wallets solve the friction of AI agents accessing paid services. By providing machine-native payments via the x402 protocol and programmable guardrails, engineers can build autonomous agents that safely discover, test, and purchase APIs without manual human intervention.
Today, it is difficult for AI agents to try out new APIs. They often have to navigate through a login page designed for humans and not agents, contact a human to add a payment method, generate an API key, and then figure out how to call the API.
This flow is very difficult for agents for two reasons: Agents do not have a stable identifier to sign up for an API, and they do not have a native way to pay for APIs. Because they lack these things, they often struggle to onboard onto software, which limits the growth of agentic commerce. AI agents often give up on these tasks entirely, kicking registration, payment methods, and API key generation back to humans. This makes it very difficult for agents to try out and compare many APIs.
To solve this, we’ve created Cloudflare Wallets. Starting today, you can claim a Cloudflare Wallet handle for your account, which will provide a unique username to help you better connect with merchants. Soon, you will be able to set up and use your Cloudflare Wallet to pay for APIs and content.
Earlier this month, we announced the Monetization Gateway to help Cloudflare customers get paid for their websites and applications. Monetization Gateway will support micropayments using the x402 protocol, which allows for payments to be attached to HTTP requests. These micropayments will be able to pay for uses ranging from AI inference to data to content. If you want to pay or get paid for services behind Monetization Gateway and other x402-compatible endpoints, you’ll need a wallet.
Cloudflare Wallets will allow you to store stablecoins, purchase services, and receive funds across the web. Each account with a wallet will also be able to create Virtual Wallets for its agents to enable them to buy APIs, MCP Tools, content, and more. You will be able to define guardrails for your Virtual Wallets (such as an allowance, an allow list, and a maximum transaction size) to help your agent spend money safely from your account. This will allow your agent to try out many APIs with low friction and managed risk. Wallet users will have the option to share their Cloudflare Wallet handles, which will give them a stable identity when interacting with merchants.
Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway will allow eligible Cloudflare customers to sell their resources (such as content or APIs) headlessly to agentic buyers. But for that market to truly develop, agents need more tools to buy from merchants in a machine-native way. Wallets will add another tool to Cloudflare’s Agents SDK, enabling AI agents to easily purchase necessary APIs and content using micropayments.
There will be two types of Cloudflare Wallets: Account Wallets and Virtual Wallets.
Account Wallets are designed for humans who are owners and users of Cloudflare accounts. They will be able to add funds, delegate spend to virtual wallets managed by agents, and remove funds as needed.
Virtual Wallets, by contrast, are designed for agents and operate via API keys. Within a Virtual Wallet, an agent will be able to spend funds according to its permissions. Its maximum spend will be capped by the limit set by the owner of the Account Wallet. This framework gives agents freedom to act on behalf of users without constant manual approval while limiting an agent’s ability to overspend.
Virtual Wallets are exciting because they will allow agents to do what they’re best at: explore dozens or hundreds of services and find the best one for a particular use case. Stablecoin micropayments via x402 will make it simple to try an API without an account, allowing agents to test new options with little friction. The spending caps on Virtual Wallets are designed so that humans can let agents explore autonomously within safe spending limits. These limits may seem like constraints, but counterintuitively they give agents more freedom. If an agent is responsible for $10, you can worry less about its spending than if it is responsible for $1,000. If an API only costs a few cents to try, then $10 is more than sufficient to pursue and evaluate many options.
Once you or your agent has picked an API to use, policies set by you in your Account Wallet will act as cost controls for Virtual Wallets. Want to give every employee a $100 per week budget for AI inference? Simply provision an Account Wallet with the right balance and create Virtual Wallets for each employee with that rule. Anyone who exceeds the limits on their Virtual Wallet will be able to request a manual override from a human who is authorized to make changes to the Account Wallet.
We want to make it easy for Account Wallets to set flexible yet firm spending policies that do not require daily, active monitoring. When something anomalous happens, such as unexpectedly fast spending, a human will be able to review and confirm whether everything is operating as intended. If the spend was intentional, then the administrator of the Account Wallet will be able to raise the limit or approve a one-time injection of funds. If the spend was unintentional, then the spending policies for adding funds to virtual wallets did their job by imposing caps.
We are working to make it as easy as possible to fund and use these wallets. We will start with simple ways to onramp and offramp funds within supported geographies, with self-funding via stablecoins available as an alternative for eligible users. The Internet will not shift completely overnight, but with a majority of traffic on the web now being driven by bots, we are excited to give agents and merchants first-class tools for agentic commerce.
Allowing humans to delegate authority to agents to easily buy and sell services is a helpful starting point. But this delegation is not always obvious to the merchants as they interact with agents. Today, if an agent comes to your website, you may know little about them as a user, despite the fact that the agent is acting on behalf of an individual or an organization. This lack of attribution challenges many traditional web business models. It’s easy to give a one-week free trial or sign-up credits to a human or an organization. It’s hard to give these same perks to an agent that lacks a stable identity and when one human can spin up dozens of agents under their control.
We solve this problem by linking wallets to a Cloudflare account via cloudflare.pay. cloudflare.pay will allow agents to optionally identify themselves, since their identity is a delegate of the account. A research agent could live at research.example.cloudflare.pay, allowing merchants to know that it is an agent from a particular organization. This approach will permit agents to maintain consistent and persistent identities, making the experience better for all parties. It will be completely optional for agents to choose to declare their identity or not, and it will be up to businesses to decide whether they want to prioritize transacting with known agents.
We believe that the approach to dealing with agents will look like the approach to dealing with VPNs: If someone is unidentified, they are not inherently untrustworthy, but they need to prove themselves more. This is why we have Turnstile and other initiatives to detect bots within Bot Management. Our identity primitive will build on top of this prior work. For example, Web Bot Auth already allows agents to register their identity via a keypair. IDs attached to Cloudflare Wallets allow this keypair to become human-readable.
We know that agentic identity standards are changing quickly, which is why we wanted to keep our approach simple. We are proposing a human-readable identifier for a not-very-readable keypair, similar to the URL and IP-address pairings used in DNS. We are not trying to define a particular schema or other verification system. We only want to make identity simple to remember and easy to declare. As schemas to enrich agentic identity develop through the x402 Foundation’s initiatives, we will seek to adopt them and intend to encourage others to do the same.
At Cloudflare, we want to offer all the building blocks for agentic commerce to succeed. Monetization Gateway will offer a way for sellers to get paid without setting up traditional payment infrastructure. Wallets will offer a way for buyers to pay headlessly via agents. Identity will allow merchants to communicate with buyers who identify themselves or enforce identification requirements.
All of these building blocks will create a headless marketplace for the Internet. If you are excited about this and want to participate, you can claim your handle now. We’re excited to see what you build and monetize.
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