$Circle Internet Corp.(CRCL)$ Lorenzo Valente, an analyst at Cathie Wood's Ark fund, recently put out a piece on Cloudflare's most recent earnings call. The numbers projected for agentic transactions, the exact kind Circle's L1 blockchain Arc is going to specialize in, are massive. Call it disruptive, call it transformational. Circle looks like the best positioned company to execute on this right now.

A lot of people missed the most important earnings call of the week. It was Cloudflare.

The wallet announcement got attention, but the real alpha was in the call itself. Cloudflare currently monetizes the internet through subscriptions: security services, AI platform spend, pools of funds. A mix of SaaS and IaaS economics. The CEO was explicit that AI agents are about to break that model.

Cloudflare sits in front of roughly 20% of internet traffic. From the call, here is what that traffic looks like:

- AI agent requests up 1,700% YoY

- Agents crossed 50% of total network traffic this quarter. First time in history non-human traffic is the majority. Management admitted it happened faster than their own models

- Their projection: if trends hold, non-human traffic outnumbers human traffic 1000x within 5 years

The monetization shift is the key part. The ad-supported internet does not work when the visitor is an agent. Cloudflare's CEO answer: block malicious bots for free, charge good agents a tiny fee per request. Fractions of a penny. They want to be the ones defining that layer.

The throughput math:

- Cloudflare handles ~500M requests per second

- They estimate 1 to 10% is monetizable via micro/nanotransactions

- That means 10M TPS on day one, scaling to 100M TPS

Visa peaks at ~20k TPS

The CEO's framing: "we're building this while others compete with Visa." Three to four orders of magnitude beyond card rails. No existing payment network can settle this. It has to be something new.

Two conclusions I keep coming back to:

- Being short L1 throughput is being short agentic workflows. If agent traffic gets monetized per request, the settlement layer needs to scale orders of magnitude beyond anything live today.

- The fee math for L1s flips. Base fees have collapsed across ETH, SOL, everywhere. MEV is getting internalized by apps. Hard to build a base fee revenue case at human scale. But at 10M TPS and $0.001 per transaction, you are looking at ~$315B a year in base fees alone. At 100M TPS the number gets silly.

Stablecoins and crypto are the end-game here for agentic finance.