**[Analysis: Cloudflare Earnings Call Signals AI Agent Economy, On-Chain Settlement Demand May Surge]** BlockBeats News, August 8 — ARK Invest's Head of Research, Lorenzo Valente, stated that the crypto community may have overlooked the most important earnings call of the week: Cloudflare's performance meeting. While the market focused on Cloudflare's wallet-related announcements, the real highlight was the management's insights into how the AI Agent era is reshaping internet infrastructure. Lorenzo pointed out that Cloudflare currently handles approximately 20% of global internet traffic, and the company's disclosed data shows that requests from AI agents have grown by 1700% year-over-year. This quarter, AI agent traffic has accounted for over 50% of total network traffic, marking the first time in internet history that non-human traffic has become the primary source of traffic. He believes AI agents will fundamentally transform the current internet business model. Traditional software service models relying on ads and subscriptions are not applicable to agent-access scenarios, as 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 revealed that Cloudflare currently processes approximately 500 million requests per second, and the company estimates that 1%-10% of this traffic has commercialization potential, corresponding to a transaction scale of about 10 million to 100 million TPS. In comparison, Visa's maximum processing capacity of approximately 20,000 TPS would be insufficient to meet the demands of the future AI agent economy. He further explained that if AI agent transactions were charged at $0.001 per transaction, even at just 10 million TPS, the base transaction fee scale could reach approximately $315 billion annually; at 100 million TPS, the potential market size would expand even further. Lorenzo concluded that betting against L1 throughput capacity is essentially betting against the development of AI agent workflows. With the rise of the AI agent economy, future settlement layers will need to exceed the capabilities of existing financial payment networks by several orders of magnitude. Stablecoins and crypto infrastructure may become critical foundational layers in the financial era of AI agents. [Original Link]