Cloudflare CEO says AI micropayments need 10 million transactions per second

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has put a number on the problem AI is creating for the open web. The number is very large. Speaking on the Bankless podcast on May 25, 2026, Prince said any micropayment system built for AI agents would need to process 10 million transactions per second on day one. Over time, he said, that could scale toward 100 million TPS as bot traffic keeps growing. For context, Visa handles around 18,000 TPS. Prince is describing a payment network hundreds of times bigger than one of the largest card networks on Earth, built for purchases worth fractions of a cent. The math behind the warning Prince’s argument starts with a simple observation. AI agents are scraping and consuming web content at a scale the internet was never designed for. Prince warned that this shift could severely disrupt the ad-funded model that keeps publishers alive. If the readers are machines, the business model built around human eyeballs starts to wobble. His fix is to let AI agents pay for what they consume, directly and automatically. That is where the throughput figures come in. Cloudflare already handles approximately 500 million requests per second across its network. Prince estimate...