Bankless
25 May 2026
The internet is about to be flooded by machines, and Matthew Prince thinks the old business model is not ready. The Cloudflare co-founder and CEO joins Bankless to explain why AI agent traffic could overtake human traffic by 2027, how crawlers are changing the economics of content, why ads and subscriptions may not survive in their current form, and how x402, stablecoins, and pay-per-crawl could create a new payment layer for the web. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🟦 COINBASE ONE | MEMBER MONTH https://bankless.cc/coinbase-one 🧭OKX | TRADE, EARN, PAY to OKX | 120M+ USERS WORLDWIDE https://app.okx.com/join/USBANKLESS 🦊 METAMASK | DOWNLOAD NOW https://go.metamask.io/BL-Pod-Download 🌐BRIX | EMERGING MARKET YIELD https://bankless.cc/brix 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:18 When AI Bot Traffic Overtakes Humans 4:19 What Cloudflare Actually Does 10:40 Life on the Internet’s “Ice Wall” 13:33 The Internet’s Business Model Problem 17:43 Google, Traffic, and the Attention Economy 24:56 AI Agents and the End of Ads 28:47 Why Faster Answers Can Still Hurt Creators 33:26 AI Companies as the Next YouTube or Netflix 38:18 Creating Scarcity for Content Markets 41:52 Content Independence Day 45:24 Should AI Agents Count as Human Users? 51:37 The Risks of Subscription-Only AI 57:24 A Golden Age of Content Creation? 1:01:46 Pay-Per-Crawl and x402 1:04:34 Why Stablecoins Matter 1:07:56 The Cloudflare Stablecoin Question 1:14:18 The Final Form of the Internet 1:17:40 The Park Record and Local Journalism 1:22:16 The Centralization Risk 1:27:12 Advice for Content Creators --- RESOURCES Matthew Prince https://x.com/eastdakota --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
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