You may not have heard of Cloudflare, but as long as you use the internet, it’s almost impossible to avoid its services.
This company is an “invisible giant” in the internet world. Whether you’re ordering takeout, scrolling through short videos, opening your email, or logging into your company’s system, chances are you’re passing through its network. Like a massive digital shield and accelerator, it provides security protection and content delivery services for nearly one-fifth of the world’s websites.
When the web pages you visit load instantly, or your favorite apps withstand hacker attacks, Cloudflare is often working behind the scenes. It truly is the “utilities” of the internet, serving as the foundational infrastructure that supports the efficient and secure flow of global data.
On September 25, Cloudflare made a landmark strategic decision, extending its infrastructure into a whole new dimension by announcing the launch of its own stablecoin—NET Dollar.
Why issue its own stablecoin?
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince provided the answer: “For decades, the business model of the internet has been built on advertising platforms and bank transfers. The next era of the internet will be driven by pay-per-use, micropayments, and microtransactions.”
Cloudflare has annual revenue exceeding $1.6 billion, handling trillions of requests daily, making it the underlying “utilities” of the internet. But within this vast digital network, payments are the only link not under its control. This sense of losing control is troubling more and more large enterprises.
Apple settles tens of billions of dollars annually for App Store developers, Amazon handles massive funds for third-party sellers, and Tesla maintains payment relationships with over 3,000 suppliers worldwide. All these giants face the same friction: lengthy settlement cycles, high fees, complex cross-border compliance, and most crucially, a loss of initiative in the most critical closed loop.
As business becomes increasingly digital and automated, this lagging financial infrastructure becomes a bottleneck. Thus, large enterprises are choosing a more direct response: if they can’t change the old system, they’ll build a new one themselves.
Why Do Big Companies Need Their Own Stablecoins?
The emergence of NET Dollar prompts a rethinking of the motivation behind stablecoin issuance. Unlike USDT or USDC, which aim for universal circulation, Cloudflare’s approach is more pragmatic—it wants to first solve payment problems within its own business ecosystem.
This difference is significant.
USDT and USDC targeted the entire crypto market from the start, relying on broad acceptance to build scale; NET Dollar, at least for now, appears more like an “internal currency,” tailored for Cloudflare’s commercial network.
Of course, boundaries are not fixed. PayPal’s PYUSD is a typical example: when it launched in 2023, it only served PayPal’s own payment system, but now it supports exchanges with hundreds of cryptocurrencies, far beyond its initial scope.
Corporate stablecoins are likely to follow a similar path, evolving from internal efficiency tools to broader circulation scenarios.
The key difference lies in motivation. Traditional stablecoin issuers mainly profit from reserve investments, while corporate stablecoins are issued to optimize processes and gain initiative. This different starting point determines their differences in design, application, and future trajectory.
For big companies, payments have always been the “last mile” of the commercial closed loop, but this segment is controlled by banks and payment institutions, with all the problems mentioned at the beginning of the article. So, internalizing payments within their own systems and rebuilding a controllable closed loop with stablecoins has become a strategic choice for large enterprises.
The true value of corporate stablecoins lies in not needing to pursue inflated narratives, but rather in acting like a scalpel to address pain points in processes, greatly improving efficiency.
This value is even more apparent in supply chain finance.
International supply chain finance is inherently a system full of friction. A payment from the US to Vietnam must cross multiple time zones, currencies, and banks. According to the World Bank, the global average remittance cost is still above 6%.
Average transaction cost for remittances to specific countries/regions (%) | Source: WORLD BANK GROUP
Corporate stablecoins can compress this process to just minutes. A US company can pay a Vietnamese supplier in minutes, with costs dropping below 1%. The time funds are in transit is greatly reduced, improving the entire supply chain’s turnover efficiency.
More importantly, the ownership of settlement rights has also changed.
Previously, banks were intermediaries, controlling the speed and cost of transactions; in a stablecoin network, companies themselves can dominate this critical link.
Besides efficiency, cost is also a burden companies cannot ignore. Exchange rate losses, bank processing fees, and card network fees in cross-border payments may seem minor individually, but together they can erode a company’s competitiveness.
This is the significance of corporate stablecoins—they bypass traditional financial intermediaries and reconstruct the cost structure. The change is not only in the absolute reduction of costs, but also in the simplification and transparency of the structure. In traditional models, companies face complex fee structures—fixed fees, percentage fees, exchange rate spreads, intermediary fees—with opaque calculations, making precise forecasting difficult.
In a stablecoin network, costs are almost reduced to just one item: on-chain transaction fees. These are public, predictable, and relatively stable. Companies can therefore calculate expenses and profits more accurately, making decisions with greater confidence.
