Below are guest posts and opinions from Ahmad Shadid, CEO of O.Xyz.
For years, broken value exchanges have defined the web. AI companies compete to build strong models, deploy bots and rub the internet of vast content without permission or compensation. This practice of harvesting news, art and data is to undermine the creators who fuel the digital world.
CloudFlare, the gatekeeper of over 24 million websites and 16% of global traffic, has turned the switch upside down and blocked those crawlers unless the publisher says otherwise. Tollbit’s State of the Bots report shows that over 26 million AI bypassed Robots.txt in March 2025 alone, indicating that the old robots.txt Honor System is dead.
Before forcing Bots to ask, CloudFlare Shifts leverages creators to set the stage for a token-driven market where access is tracked, licensed and paid. As a result, we can rewrite how digital content is evaluated, controlled and accelerated blockchain-based tokenization.
Paywalls meet “per crawl payment”
CloudFlare’s Crawl Scheme new salary allows publishers to bill bots for access. I borrow the logic of a paywall, but target machines on behalf of people. Each crawler must first authenticate via a special header. CloudFlare weighs all URL requests, debits the bot owner’s prepaid account, and passes micropayments to the publisher in real time. This model solves one problem while exposing another problem: permission confusion. How does a crawler prove that he paid the right amount to the right owner? How will the publisher revoke access if the terms change?
Traditional contracts struggle with bot speed. Hammering a bespoke license will redline for weeks and run five-digit legal invoices, but crawlers can scan 1 million pages before the ink dries. Tokens are excellent there. They embedded rights, prices and revocation rules directly into the code. When a crawler encounters protected content, it can present a wallet-based license. This site validates token-on-chain and provides or rejects data. There’s no email chain or lawyer – just encryption yes or no.
Benefits of tokenization licenses
Smart contracts automate enforcement. They check the license on every request and record their usage in a transparent ledger. It also allows granular pricing. Writers can request Satoshi per paragraph, but photographers can price pixels and make micropayments practical. We already have a massive precedent – Shutterstock’s six-year licensing agreement with Openai turned media archives into meter feeds, generating more than $100 million in AI-Data revenues last year.
The token traveled the Global Rail and paid a soul crawler to a poet in Sao Paulo in seconds, skipping currency friction. If the terms are permitted, the license will be traded in the secondary market and can send fresh royalties to the creator. These features create programmable markets where owners adhere to rules and algorithms, turning scraping into voluntary trade.
But the friction is real
Tokenization is not a silver bullet. First of all, creators must be creating their works. It’s a step that many people find daunting. Secondly, standards are competing. In Ethereum, the ERC-1155 reduces gas by issuing both bulk dependencies and NFT IDs on a single contract and batching forwarding. Meanwhile, Solana’s SPL mimics each asset with its own program, at the expense of Solana’s ultra-low fees and high-throughput lane flexibility.
You can get a glimpse into how cheap Layer 2 makes these licenses already exist. FoxCorp’s “Verify” protocol runs on Polygon’s POS Sidechain to pin the hash of content to Ethereum while manipulating low-cost verification at speed.
Cross-platform enforcement remains unstable. Licenses recognized in Ethereum may appear invisible to Solana-based bots. It illustrates the urgent need for cross-chain standards that could serve as a universal language for these tokens.
Scalability is also important. CloudFlare processes trillions of requests every day. Each chain-on-chain verification melts the gas meter. Off-chain proof or layer 2 networking is useful, but adds complexity. Finally, small publishers acknowledge in blockchain fees and regulatory grey zones. Any solution must risk lowering these barriers or protecting only those who are already strong.
Crypto builders sniff out the opportunity
All the constraints discussed so far shout out the startup gap. Wallet-free Impossible Token (NFT) mint, crawler-readable license schema, and subscription-style bridges between Fiat and Token are all ripe green fields. CloudFlare’s move creates urgency and, crucially, free marketing.
In anticipation of a toolkit that connects directly to WordPress and Ghost, we will create behind-the-scenes licenses and automatically update Robots.txt. The leading AI labs, hungry for clean, licensed data, are already in discussions to jointly recruit such a pipeline to win to combat multijudicial litigation by paying known fees.
AI’s better data diet
Tokenized content doesn’t just send royalties. It can improve the quality of your model. Licensed datasets remain traceable, allowing researchers to audit bias and source. If the artwork is sitting behind immutable tokens, the model can attach credits and context rather than removing them.
Because tokens can represent the data users sell, a data union or cooperative pool can allow daily people to share the revenue from their training sets and adjust incentives from the creator and consumer aspects.
This kind of transparency also helps the public. When an AI tool quotes an article, it can be linked directly to the token record. Readers click to track lineage and restore the spirit of the web’s original hyperlink.
From extraction to exchange
The CloudFlare lockdown highlights the truth that the Crypto community has been yelling for years. Digital value requires digital ownership. Web2 rewards copy pasting speed. Web3 reward-proof origin.
Yes, the hurdles remain. The standard must converge and the user experience must be reduced to a “set and forget it” toggle. However, the power of the market is currently lined up. Publishers want leverage, AI labs want data, and blockchain rails can mediate transactions.
Close Signal: Seizes the window
The sudden shift in web infrastructure was when the browser started flagging non-HTTPS sites. Early lock-in publishers set floor prices for creative work, and AI builders who become partners instead of looting will acquire the clean, compliant datasets that the model coves.
Regulators are watching, investors are turning, and standards groups are sprinting to keep pace. History remembers the day the scrapers got their price tag. Tokenize access, make bots pay, and keep internet keys in the creator’s hands.
It is mentioned in this article
