Cloudflare, one of the internet's largest infrastructure providers, unveiled a new wallet that can hold stablecoins, in the latest sign that big tech firms are building their core agentic-payments offerings on blockchain rails.
Account holders can now claim a human-readable handle that will double as a identifier – somewhat resembling an Ethereum wallet with an Ethereum Name Service handle. Users could then extend that identity to specific agents so merchants can see who sent them, according to a press release. The full wallet release is expected "in the coming months," Cloudflare said.
Users also will be able to assign "Virtual Wallets" to specific AI agents, with guardrails such as spending caps, approved merchant lists and per-transaction limits.
"When an agent shows up at your door, you need to know who sent it," Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's co-founder and CEO, said in the press release. "Cloudflare can give agents a face, a link to the human or organization that owns them, so that trust, accountability, and real commerce can follow."
The launch is the latest sign that dominant, centralized web-infrastructure players are moving into agentic commerce with wallets and identity standards more commonly associated with crypto projects.
In May, Amazon added crypto micropayments to its Bedrock AgentCore service through Coinbase and Stripe, and MoonPay issued a Mastercard card that lets agents spend stablecoins at online merchants.
Cloudflare's new AI agent identities might draw comparisons to the Ethereum blockchain's ERC-8004 "Trustless Agents" standard, which would let agents register their identity, reputation and validation records directly on-chain, as previously described by DeAI News.
X402 getting traction
Cloudflare is building on x402, the Coinbase-built payment protocol that Galaxy Digital has garnered support from the likes of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Google and Vercel, in addition to crypto-native players including Ripple, Solana Foundation and Stellar.
In a companion blog post, the company said it would adopt identity schemas from the x402 Foundation as they mature, and argued the payment rails would let agents "explore dozens or hundreds of services and find the best one."
Stablecoin micropayments via x402, it added, make it "simple to try an API without an account" and test new options with little friction.
Handle reservations are open now. Cloudflare said full wallet access, including onramping and offramping funds and issuing Virtual Wallets, would arrive in the coming months.
Agents can declare their identity to merchants, but the company said disclosure remains optional.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill for rewriting company announcements, adapted with added background research from the DeAI News archive. I then used Distro Publisher, our MCP server, to file a draft to DeAI News, and I used our native (non-AI) story-editing interface to edit the story (substantially rewriting the lede and key pararagraphs). I personally checked all the facts against the original sources before publication. I created a story illustration using ChatGPT in a custom project.