Cloudflare Introduces Net Dollar
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
cloudflare.comTechstory
skepticalnegative
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CloudflareStablecoinAI-Driven InternetMicrotransactions
Key topics
Cloudflare
Stablecoin
AI-Driven Internet
Microtransactions
Cloudflare introduces NET Dollar, a stablecoin for AI-driven internet transactions, sparking skepticism and debate among HN users about its potential impact and motivations.
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Sep 25, 2025 at 6:59 PM EDT
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Why is the standard tied directly a single for profit company an improvement to the system that isn't tied to any specific wntity and anyone can use?
Woohoo! I freaking love coinslop!
I non-sarcastically agree.
What's wrong with same day ACH?
The risk of having the money be not in a FDIC bank makes this a nonstarter.
The Australian dollar has gone up about 20% vs the American dollar since Trump.
For whom? The least volatile asset relative to dollars are dollars. The moment you start building a money-market fund you have novel risks, from credit to rates and FX. (And, in the extreme, legal.)
For people outside of the US.
They’re better off with their own currency or an international currency (currently, Euros or dollars). Almost never a basket. (The IMF has SDRs. And various trade-weighted baskets are constructed for metric purposes. They aren’t practical instruments.)
Which makes it garbage for transacting if you’re paid in or pay with any other currency.
Modern currencies split their store of value and medium of exchange components. Stablecoins (and credit cards and checking accounts) seize on the latter. Bitcoins (and Treasuries and money-market funds) the former.
It's about making free money, not about making sense. They back it with USD because recent US regulations allow stablecoins to be backed by US securities. They will buy these securities, and for every dollar converted into their coin, they will earn a percentage per year. Free money.
It looks like it will be an API for agents [1].
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...
Basically, "pay to bypass our CAPTCHA!".
Not that I'd complain about one less pointless blockchain in the world, it's just funny.
That said, they’re emphasising speed. (“Instant.”)
That seems to preclude using a major, public blockchain. (On the other hand, they don’t talk up privacy.)
[1] https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/
I suppose. I don’t see why Cloudflare would want to give up that sort of control. The advantage they bring to the table is they’re a trusted brand per se.
Oh totally, that’s why I qualified blockchain with major and public.
The funny part is how cryptobros insist that it's an actual solution, but companies universally ignore it to make an L1 chain (because there's no point wasting your time making an L2).
I still prefer well-designed L1s because they are simpler.
Edit: I was not wrong.
But I am sure this will really be the crypto coin to power the internet’s transactions. All the previous ones got it wrong, this is the solution. /s
Instead of this, we need a central bank that can provide everyone with a direct account to stop all the banking speculation. That’s the instant transactions I want.
Hard nope from me post Trump. We don’t need the President having potentially unregulated and direct visibility into and access to every American’s bank account.
(And no, it’s not currently the case. The FBI still has to e.g. request records, a process which creates friction and the potential for pushback or whistleblowing.)
He hasn’t asked for it. I strongly doubt if he can control the Fed and FTC that the IRS will somehow be a red line.
> ideally you’d be able to get a foreign central bank account too
Oh goodie, what I need in my life is the CCP being able to blackmail me.
I don’t really want to go down a full political rabbit hole but Trump can ask for whatever he wants. If you look at all the cases in the federal courts currently they all are basically figuring out just how much of what he has tried is actually legal and mostly finding that very little of it is. As a result you’ll see headlines like “Trump requests JumpCrisscross’s medical records and bank statements” on the front page of CNN but you won’t see the headline on page six that reads “Trump appointed judge laughed the FBI’s lawyers out of the court room for making a stupid request.”
50% of Web traffic doesn't flow through Coinbase or Tether; it goes through Cloudflare. So yeah, they have a much greater chance of successfully erecting a tollbooth. And just like you pay US taxes in US dollars you'll pay Cloudflare tax in Cloudflare dollars.
Idk what this is
No indication they have.
“Stablecoins could be issued by banks and credit unions (through subsidiaries) or nonbanks. Nonbanks would be restricted to financial firms unless the Treasury Secretary and chairs of the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)—referred to as the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee (SCRC)—unanimously find they do not pose risks to the banking or financial system and will comply with certain requirements.”
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12553
I don't understand this. How is pay per use and paywalling content going to incentivize the creation of original content? If anything, people are more incentivized to create low quality, generic content because they're not directly accessible by humans.
Of course, one side effect will be crippling search engines as well. Maybe less important for driving traffic in the social media era?
I wrote up more detailed thoughts here: https://www.pberg.com/blog/2025/09/25/cloudflares-agentic-to...
Pretty smart.
The open internet died a very long time ago. It’s been dead for years. It’s not coming back unless we figure out a way to make shareholders happy. Paying these companies for the content they host is how that happens.
No need to be totally cynic to kinda know how this will play out..
But at least maybe that will rightfully discourage companies from using it.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRCL/
Want PBS to stick around? Make it so anybody who's sticking on chat GPT gets great answers from PBS and every time ChatGPT scrapes it, PBS gets money.
Is it extremely difficult? Obviously. Will it work? Probably not, very few things do. Is it a great thing that some folks are doing it and trying to make it work so that we can have a functional media ecosystem in a post-social-media age? Absolutely.