Cloudflare Executive Says Ethereum’s Original Sharding Plan Could Work for Payments

Cloudflare is exploring blockchain infrastructure for the stablecoin micropayments it is building, with executive Will Papper saying Ethereum’s original sharding plan could offer a path to internet-scale payment capacity.

Papper, Cloudflare’s director of product for agent payments, said shard chains were difficult for decentralized finance because the same asset could trade at different prices across separate chains. Payments avoid that cross-shard pricing problem because a dollar remains a dollar when transferred, he said.

Ethereum shifted to a rollup-focused roadmap in October 2020. Under that model, rollups process transactions outside Ethereum while using the network for data availability. Shard chains that perform their own computation are no longer part of Ethereum’s roadmap.

Papper said Cloudflare’s potential demand would exceed the combined capacity of the blockchain sector if the company monetized even a small percentage of its HTTP requests. General-purpose blockchains have mainly increased throughput by using more powerful servers, reaching between 10,000 and 100,000 transactions per second, he said.

That approach can support current crypto activity, Papper said, but scaling beyond the limit of a single server requires adding more instances. In Ethereum’s ecosystem, rollups provide that additional capacity by operating alongside the main network.

Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway for sellers and Wallets for buyers, its payment products for agents, are going live soon. The company is also exploring whether to launch its own blockchain.

Papper said Cloudflare needs the scale of the internet and is examining available blockchain options. He also invited teams working on horizontally scalable blockchain solutions to contact him.