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RSL Collective

RSL Collective

Nonprofit Standards Organization

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The race to build AI's payment layer

Money Moves

Managing Really Simple Licensing standard

For two years, AI companies have trained their models on web content while paying for almost none of it. That era may be ending. Cloudflare's acquisition of Human Native, announced January 15, 2026, adds a London-based data marketplace to an infrastructure stack that already includes bot-blocking tools, pay-per-crawl billing, and the x402 machine payment protocol built with Coinbase. Days after the acquisition, Cloudflare signaled its next move: a dollar-backed stablecoin called NET to power AI micropayments, turning the x402 protocol from concept into usable financial infrastructure.

Updated Jan 16