Analysis: Cloudflare Earnings Call Unleashes AI Proxy Economy Signal, On-Chain Settlement Demand Poised to Explode

August 8: ARK Invest Research Director Lorenzo Valente stated that the crypto community may have missed the most important earnings conference call of the week—Cloudflare's earnings call. While the market focused on news related to Cloudflare's wallet, what is truly worth noting is the management's assessment of the Internet infrastructure shift to the AI Agents era.

Lorenzo pointed out that Cloudflare currently handles about 20% of Internet traffic, and the data disclosed by the company indicates that AI agent requests have grown by 1700% year-on-year. This quarter, AI agent traffic has accounted for over 50% of the total network traffic, marking the first time in Internet history that non-human traffic has become the primary traffic source.

He believes that AI agents will completely transform the current Internet business model. The traditional software service model relying on advertising and subscriptions is not suitable for agent access scenarios because AI agents do not browse ads like human users. In the future, Cloudflare may establish a new Internet value settlement layer by charging minimal micropayment fees for legitimate AI agent requests.

Lorenzo stated that Cloudflare currently processes about 5 billion requests per second, with the company expecting 1%-10% of the traffic to have commercial potential, corresponding to a transaction scale of approximately 10 million to 100 million TPS. Visa, with a maximum throughput of about 20,000 TPS, cannot meet the future demands of the AI agent economy.

He believes that if AI agent transactions are charged at $0.001 per transaction, even with just 10 million TPS, the basic transaction fee scale could reach approximately $315 billion annually; if it reaches 100 million TPS, the potential market size will expand further.

Lorenzo concluded that shorting Layer 1 throughput capacity is actually shorting the development of AI agent workflows. With the rise of the AI agent economy, the future settlement layer will need to be several orders of magnitude larger than the existing financial payment networks, and stablecoins and crypto infrastructure may become crucial underpinnings of the agent financial era.