Virtual wallets allow agents to spend stablecoins on behalf of the owner. Over 160 million such microtransactions have already been processed through the payment system.
On August 4, Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Wallets, a system enabling AI agents to independently pay for APIs, data, and content using stablecoins. The owner of the main wallet can create separate virtual wallets for agents, fund them, and set limits—such as a list of approved vendors and maximum transaction amounts. This gives agents the ability to make payments autonomously, while remaining within the boundaries set by the owner.
These wallets complement a service Cloudflare launched on July 1, which allows websites and APIs to charge AI agents a fee for each request. The company estimates that its infrastructure supports one in five websites worldwide. For the agents themselves, this creates an opportunity not only to access paid services but also to pay for them without human intervention.
Image source: generated by Nano Banana
Payments are processed via x402—a protocol developed with Coinbase’s involvement and now supported by the Linux Foundation. According to Agent Economy, the protocol has already processed over 160 million transactions totaling $41.2 million across seven blockchain networks, averaging about $0.26 per transaction. Low costs are crucial for this type of payment: an agent might need to pay for numerous individual data or API requests, making the fixed fees of traditional payment systems prohibitively high.
However, the full rollout of Cloudflare Wallets is not yet complete; while wallet identification was available at launch, funding capabilities and the full suite of payment features are scheduled to arrive in the coming months. Google Cloud, Circle, Visa, Mastercard, Cloudflare, and AWS are already competing in the market to develop infrastructure for AI agent payments. According to Varun Datta, founder and CEO of Truth Ventures, the key elements of this system may ultimately prove to be not the agents themselves, but the infrastructure for their identification, the limitation of their authority, and the mechanics of executing microtransactions.
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