Cloudflare Opens Closed Beta for Tokenized Gateway, Lets AI Agents Pay Per Request in USDC on Base

This matters less as a payments story than as an infrastructure one: Cloudflare is positioning stablecoin settlement as plumbing for machine-to-machine commerce, using a protocol designed for exactly this case but long dormant. The immediate beneficiaries are API and data providers seeking to charge autonomous agents without accounts or subscriptions, though the closed beta limits who can test that thesis. The open question is whether per-request stablecoin billing becomes a default for agent traffic or stays a niche add-on, and whether USDC on Base proves the right settlement layer as volumes scale.