Cloudflare Taps Ethereum Sharding Design for Scalable Stablecoin Payments

Cloudflare, a company that routes about 20% of global web traffic, has launched a payments product that could revolutionize machine-to-machine transactions. The product, called Monetization Gateway, uses Ethereum's sharding design to enable scalable stablecoin payments.

The gateway allows sellers to charge for web resources using USDC stablecoin payments settled on Base and Polygon networks. It's built around x402, a revived version of HTTP's long-dormant 402 status code, optimized for stablecoin transactions with near-instant finality and negligible fees.

Cloudflare's Director of Product, Will Papper, sees the need for a payment layer that can handle 5 to 50 million transactions per second. He believes Ethereum's sharding design could enable this scalability, citing the network's original proposal as the architectural model for Cloudflare's infrastructure.