Lorenzo Valente on X: "CT missed the most important earnings call of the week. It wasn't a crypto company. It was @Cloudflare ..," / X

ETH will be the financial rails for an agentic world:

CT missed the most important earnings call of the week. It wasn't a crypto company. It was Cloudflare.

Everyone caught the wallet announcement. The real alpha was in the call itself.

Today Cloudflare monetizes the internet through subscriptions: security services, AI platform spend, pools of funds. A mix of SaaS and IaaS economics. The CEO was explicit that AI agents are about to break that model. Cloudflare sits in front of roughly 20% of internet traffic. Here's what that traffic looks like from the call: \- AI agent requests up 1,700% YoY \- Agents crossed 50% of total network traffic this quarter. First time in history non-human traffic is the majority. Management admitted it happened faster than their own models \- Their projection: if trends hold, non-human traffic outnumbers human traffic 1000x within 5 years The monetization shift is the key part. The ad-supported internet doesn't work when the visitor is an agent. Cloudflare's CEO answer: block malicious bots for free, charge good agents a tiny fee per request. Fractions of a penny. They want to be the ones defining that layer. Now the throughput math here: \- Cloudflare handles \~500M requests per second \- They estimate 1 to 10% is monetizable via micro/nanotransactions \- That means 10M TPS on day one, scaling to 100M TPS Visa peaks at \~20k TPS The CEO's framing: "we're building this while others compete with Visa." Three to four orders of magnitude beyond card rails. No existing payment network can settle this. It has to be something new. Two conclusions I keep coming back to: \- Being short L1 throughput is being short agentic workflows. If agent traffic gets monetized per request, the settlement layer needs to scale orders of magnitude beyond anything live today. \- The fee math for L1s flips. Base fees have collapsed across ETH, SOL, everywhere. MEV is getting internalized by apps. Hard to build a base fee revenue case at human scale. But at 10M TPS and $0.001 per transaction, you're looking at \~$315B a year in base fees alone. At 100M TPS the number gets silly. Stablecoins and crypto are the end-game here for Agentic finance

7 comments held Reddit says 0 on reddit ↗

u/ThatGuyFromWhere 1 1 day ago

This has always been my thesis. We don’t require any additional human adoption to grow orders of magnitude
u/UpperTechnician1152 1 1 day ago

Is this built on Ethereum?
u/julyboom 1 1 day ago

what makes you think agents wont find a workaround?
u/chicken6 1 1 day ago

Why would they use ETH over SOL? TRON?
u/MakCapital 1 1 day ago

What does this have to do with Ethereum? Without scaling, this volume will hit Solana, Polygon & Base. Solana already taking around 80% of x402 activity. Also, revenue is down on scalable chains because they continue to scale. Tipping for block inclusion hasn't been necessary even though chains like Solana are currently seeing more activity than ever. First you capture users and their activity. Then you raise base fees to increase revenue. Just like any platform ever. Fee increase proposals going through on Solana as I write this. This is bullish news. Just not as bullish for ETH.
u/---Truthseeker--- 1 1 day ago

Ethereum continues to focus on security and decentralization. Will be the most secure and decentralized blockchain by 2030. Its competitive edge. Solana doesnt have a moat. It focused on low fees and speed but now no longer has an edge. If they raise their fees they will lose marketshare to L2s. In the future agentic high volume transactions will lift all boats. Solana will also do well but will have a hard time completing against L2 specific chains that are just as cheap and fast enough.
u/MakCapital 1 1 day ago

Scale for users and revenue or focus on being the best version of encrypted money. Increased security for markets you can't run is meaningless. Security is already good enough. That's considering entities like Lido own a quarter of all staked ETH. This problem wouldn't still exist if Ethereum was truly optimizing for security. Either way, it's good enough. Security on many major stake based network is good enough for global markets. Especially Ethereum's largest competitor. What happens when you incorporate native delegation. You can scale with security. Scale or become the best version of encrypted money. The latest roadmap isn't showing promises of scaling to take back all defi, but it does show Ethereum has a future. Just not the future many wanted and significant upgrades still many years away. Why most still pretending defi remains on Ethereum. The TVL may. Not the activity, users, or their potential rev. So much gaslighting.