Will Papper, Cloudflare's director of product for agent payments, said a blockchain split into parallel shard chains — the design Ethereum dropped for rollups — could carry the stablecoin micropayments Cloudflare is building, though he said it was "way too difficult for DeFi." Papper made the remarks on Unchained Premium in an episode recorded Sept. 17 and released Sept. 22, according to the show.
Cloudflare executive says dropped Ethereum sharding design could carry stablecoin payments
Will Papper, Cloudflare's director of product for agent payments, said a blockchain split into parallel shard chains — the design Ethereum dropped for rollups — could carry the stablecoin micropayments Cloudflare is building, though he said it was "way too difficult for DeFi." Papper made the remarks on Unchained Premium in an episode recorded Sept. 17 and released Sept. 22, according to the show.
Papper said trading and lending across shards leave slightly different prices on each one, and that every added shard means more work to correct them. Payments do not have that problem, he said, because "a dollar is a dollar. If you send it somewhere, it still stays a dollar."
Asked about Ethereum, Papper said: "Ethereum wanted to pursue this. It was way too difficult for DeFi. But I think you can pull it off for payments, which is exciting." When host Laura Shin said fragmentation was Ethereum's issue and that Cloudflare was after "scaling without fragmentation," Papper called that "the holy grail" and added, "that's what Ethereum's original roadmap was."
Ethereum changed course in October 2020, when Vitalik Buterin proposed a rollup-centric roadmap. He argued that rollups storing their data on shards would scale further, and sooner, than shard chains running their own computation. Shard chains are "no longer part of the roadmap," ethereum.org says.
Papper repeated a claim he has made before on X, saying, "So if we monetize even a small percentage of our HTTP requests, that's more scale than every single blockchain combined." He said general-purpose chains have mostly scaled by "putting it on a really big server," which can get them to between 10,000 and 100,000 transactions per second, and that this works for now because "crypto today has not exceeded that throughput yet." Asked whether what Cloudflare wanted sounded like "a Solana-like solution," Papper placed Solana in that group, calling it "a really big, powerful server" and adding that "there's nothing wrong with that approach." Once a chain hits that limit, he said, "you need to add more instances, which in the Ethereum world is rollups."
Cloudflare's payment products for agents — the Monetization Gateway for sellers and Wallets for buyers — are announced and "going live soon," Papper said. Asked whether Cloudflare might launch its own blockchain, he said "we know that we need the scale" of the internet and that the company is "seeing what's out there," adding, "I'm spending a lot of time figuring out what that looks like," and, "please do DM me if you're working on a blockchain solution that horizontally scales."
- The source does not give a launch date for Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway or Wallets beyond "going live soon."
- The source does not name any blockchain Cloudflare is evaluating, or state whether it will build its own.
- The source does not state what throughput figure Cloudflare is targeting for internet scale.
- The source does not cite independent verification of Papper's claim that monetizing a small percentage of Cloudflare's HTTP requests would exceed every blockchain combined; the claim is attributed to Papper.
- The source does not state whether Ethereum developers, Solana, or other blockchain teams have responded to Papper's comments.
- The source does not state what design changes would be required for a shard-based system to handle payments.
- The source does not date or link the earlier X post by Papper that it references.
- The source is the outlet that produced the Unchained Premium episode it reports on and includes a subscription promotion for that product; the source also states the article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by an Unchained editor.
Read the original at Unchained