Linux Foundation

Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway revives the dormant HTTP 402 status code: any page, API, dataset or MCP tool behind Cloudflare can now return a price that AI agents pay in stablecoins, settled in under a second. Sample pricing runs to $0.001 per call plus $0.01 per MB.

The catch the thread seizes on: payment is stablecoin-only and Cloudflare-brokered. A developer who shipped a Bitcoin Lightning version of this eight years ago notes such paywalls have existed for years and never reached critical mass.

The pitch is a single confidential reporting channel, a security response team, real funding, and “maintainer of last resort” coverage for abandoned packages. The signatories include AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, JPMorgan and IBM.

That roster is exactly the problem for readers: a project that “favors centralization and corporate circles” signed by the companies many blame for the strain on open source — and which employs no engineers of its own to do the fixing.