Jesse Pollak Sets 10M Payments Per Second as Base's North Star

Jesse Pollak, creator and lead of Base, named 10 million payments per second as the network's north star on Oct. 1, 2026, framing that throughput as the level required for businesses to capture the value of every page on the internet.

Pollak's comment came in response to a post from base describing Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway, which lets APIs running on Cloudflare charge AI agents on a per-request basis, with those payments settled in USDC on Base. The base post framed agents as emerging economic actors and positioned Base as the venue where they transact.

What the integration does

Under the model described by base, an API provider on Cloudflare can bill an autonomous agent for each individual request rather than through subscription or bulk invoicing. Settlement happens onchain in USDC on Base, giving agent operators a payment rail denominated in dollars rather than a volatile asset.

Why the target matters

Base is the Ethereum Layer 2 incubated by Coinbase and built on Optimism's OP Stack, which the company announced in February 2023. Pollak has described himself as "base builder #001" and holds the onchain identity jesse.base.eth.

The stated 10 million payments-per-second figure sits well above current Layer 2 throughput, putting the number in the category of a long-range design goal rather than a live metric. What to watch for is whether Base publishes concrete throughput figures or roadmap milestones tied to that target.