Monetization Gateway beta: charge AI agents for consumption with HTTP 402

This post introduces the Cloudflare Monetization Gateway, a new capability that allows sellers to charge agents for API access using the HTTP 402 status code and stablecoin transactions. It details the architecture, which uses Coinbase's x402 Facilitator for payment settlement on the Base blockchain with USDC. The post showcases four customer use cases: Cloudflare AI Gateway (paying for inference), Ceramic.ai (paying for web search), Stocktwits (paying for stock signals), and API2PDF (paying for API access). The Monetization Gateway integrates with existing pricing engines and offers flexible pricing schemes, including per-request and fixed pricing.