Cloudflare launched Pay Per Crawl. It lets publishers charge AI crawlers for content access. They're bringing HTTP 402 (Payment Required) back from the dead after 25 years. But the payment infrastructure feels like a missed opportunity. Current setup: Cloudflare aggregates billing between crawlers and publishers. Traditional payment rails, waiting for settlement cycles, cross-border complexity. With AI market hitting $279B in 2024 and projected to reach $1.8T by 2030, we need better payment infrastructure. Now imagine stablecoins settlement: - Crawler sends payment hash in request header - Smart contract verifies instantly - Publisher gets paid per request, real-time - No intermediary needed The protocol already supports it: Current: `crawler-max-price: USD 0.05` Future: `crawler-payment-tx: 0x123...` It's seems to be one header change away from onchain payments. "The true potential of pay per crawl may emerge in an agentic world" We may see agents with crypto wallets negotiating content access programmatically between each other. There's still a lot of complexity to overcome - gas fees, privacy, KYC thresholds - just to name a few. The infrastructure's ready. The market's perspective. The protocol supports it. Who's building the bridge?