ARK: Cloudflare's Earnings Report Reveals AI Proxy Traffic Exceeds 50%
Lorenzo Valente, research director at ARK Invest, pointed out that the crypto community may have missed the most important Cloudflare earnings call this week, focusing on management's assessment of changes in internet infrastructure in the era of AI proxies.
Cloudflare handles about 20% of internet traffic, with AI proxy requests increasing by 1700% year-on-year. This quarter, AI proxy traffic has exceeded 50% of total network traffic, marking the first time non-human traffic has become a major source; the company is considering charging micro-payment fees for legitimate AI proxy requests.
The traffic structure is shifting from human browsing to proxy dominance, leading to a reconstruction of internet business models driven by events, benefiting infrastructure with high throughput settlement capabilities, while traditional advertising and subscription models are under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
As a major player in edge networking, Cloudflare has long handled large-scale requests. The latest earnings report shows that AI proxy traffic has exploded far beyond internal expectations, shifting from training crawlers to real-time proxy interactions, extending the path from security and CDN services to the Agent economy settlement layer.
Resource allocation focuses on micro-payments and high TPS capability construction, motivated by the need to capture value through extremely low per-transaction fees when proxies become the primary visitors, while addressing the bottleneck of existing payment networks that cannot support tens of millions to billions of TPS.
This is similar to the early internet's paradigm shift from portals to search engines, or the impact of mobile internet on desktop advertising; we are currently in a transition phase from human traffic to machine traffic dominance, with settlement infrastructure evolving from Visa-level capabilities to crypto network scales.
Essentially, this represents a transfer of pricing power: the value of the internet is shifting from human attention to proxy requests. The mechanism is that once non-human traffic exceeds half, traditional monetization paths become ineffective, and the micro-payment and high throughput layers become the new core of value capture.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
When non-human traffic exceeds half, the advertising model becomes ineffective.
The bottleneck of the proxy economy lies in settlement throughput rather than computation.
The micro-payment layer will reshape the distribution of internet value.