Cloudflare CEO Says AI Agent Traffic Could Be 1,000X Human Traffic in Five Years

Cloudflare is racing to build a sub-penny micropayment rail for AI agents that must process over 100x Visa's transaction volume.

• Agent traffic surge: Cloudflare says automated/agent traffic passed human traffic online in early 2026, far ahead of its prior forecast of second-half 2027, and could be 1,000x human traffic within five years.
• New payments layer needed: Cloudflare believes it must process roughly 10 million transactions per second on day one (scaling past 100 million), versus Visa's ~80,000 TPS peak, with micro-fees as small as a thousandth of a penny per data access.

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