Cloudflare introduces NET Dollar, a U.S. dollar–backed token designed to move fractions of a cent in real time for AI agents, developers, and site owners. The company says it removes payment delays that slow machine-to-machine commerce and supports micropayments, fractional splits, and headless scripts to shift digital revenue away from ads and card rails. The token maintains one-to-one reserves in U.S. dollars and aims to touch every party that runs an online service, builds an agent, or hosts a monetization platform.
The present Internet economy relies on advertising revenue and batched bank transfers, a setup Cloudflare says cannot serve traffic produced by autonomous agents. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince argues that “pay-per-use, fractional payments next to microtransactions” reward original content. To establish a common payment grammar, the firm is publishing the Agent Payments Protocol and the x402 standard so wallets, agents, and sites interoperate.
The design stresses speed and global reach, aiming for settlement in seconds without regard to country or banking hours. Personal agents that reserve flights, shopping bots that reorder stock, and supplier agents that release payment on delivery confirmation should all settle inside the same API call that triggers the service. The architecture targets the removal of multi-day lags and cross-border fees that accompany wires and cards.
Will NET Dollar be fully backed?
NET Dollar is a dollar-backed token purpose-built for AI micropayments. Cloudflare open sources Agent Payments Protocol and x402 to let any service speak the same payment language. The design prioritizes speed and global reach, while adoption and first-day liquidity pose the immediate hurdle. Regulatory treatment and reserve transparency remain the largest external risks.
Cloudflare released NET Dollar on 25 September 2025. Whether the product moves past pilots hinges on developer uptake and on how regulators classify dollar tokens used by autonomous software.
