AI agents just got an allowance.

What’s happening: On August 4, Cloudflare launched Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay, giving AI agents a verified identity and a stablecoin wallet their owner controls. Investors liked the look of it; shares jumped 6.1% to $300.11, a 52-week high.

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The pitch isn’t that agents can pay. It’s that they can be traced, capped, and cut off. Here’s how it works:

  • Account Wallets hold the money. A human funds them, sets the rules, and can pull the plug.

  • Virtual Wallets go to individual agents, each with a spending allowance, an approved-recipient list, a max transaction size, and automatic flags for weird spending.

  • cloudflare.pay handles (think: research.acme.cloudflare.pay) give each agent a public identity, backed by cryptographic keys via Web Bot Auth.

  • Settlement runs in USDC across ten chains, with Coinbase’s x402 facilitator as the default. Handles are free and live now; funding and wallet issuance land “in the coming months.”

Handle reservation is free and live today. Funding, onramps, and Virtual Wallet issuance arrive “in the coming months.”

Settlement runs in USDC across ten chains, including Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon, with Coinbase’s public x402 facilitator as the default. The x402 protocol has settled 160.6 million transactions worth $41.2 million, roughly 26 cents each ($41.2M ÷ 160.6M = $0.257).