Cloudflare’s Will Papper suggests Ethereum’s sharding design could enable scalable stablecoin payments

Cloudflare, the company that routes roughly 20% of all global web traffic, just launched a payments product that could quietly reshape how machines pay each other on the internet. And the scaling architecture behind it? Borrowed straight from Ethereum’s original sharding blueprint. Will Papper, who joined Cloudflare as Director of Product in July 2026, is leading the company’s push into stablecoin micropayments. His thesis is straightforward: the internet needs a payment layer that can handle 5 to 50 million transactions per second, and no existing blockchain comes close to delivering that on its own. The Monetization Gateway and x402 Cloudflare launched its Monetization Gateway on July 1, 2026, giving sellers the ability to charge for web resources using USDC stablecoin payments settled on Base and Polygon networks. The product is built around x402, a revived version of HTTP’s long-dormant 402 status code, now optimized for stablecoin transactions with near-instant finality and negligible fees. The target customer isn’t a person buying coffee. It’s an AI agent making sub-cent payments millions of times per second to access APIs, data feeds, or computational resources across the we...