Cloudflare Reports Surge in AI Proxy Traffic, On-Chain Settlement Demand May Explode

On August 8, Cloudflare's earnings call attracted attention as ARK Invest's research director, Lorenzo Valente, pointed out that AI proxy requests have increased by 1700% year-on-year, with AI proxy traffic accounting for over 50% of total network traffic this quarter. This marks the first time in internet history that non-human traffic has become a major source of traffic. Valente believes that AI proxies will change the internet's business model, making traditional advertising and subscription models obsolete. Cloudflare may establish a new layer of internet value settlement by charging micropayments for legitimate AI proxy requests. Cloudflare processes approximately 500 million requests per second, with an estimated 1%-10% of that traffic having commercial potential, corresponding to a transaction scale of about 10 million to 100 million TPS. Visa's maximum processing capacity of about 20,000 TPS will not meet the future demands of the AI proxy economy. Valente estimates that if AI proxy transactions are charged at $0.001 each, the base transaction fee scale for 10 million TPS could reach approximately $315 billion annually, with the potential market scale for 100 million TPS further expanding. He concluded that shorting L1 throughput capacity is essentially shorting the development of AI proxy workflows, and the future settlement layer will need to be several orders of magnitude higher than existing financial payment networks, with stablecoins and crypto infrastructure likely becoming important foundations in the era of proxy finance.