How Cathie Wood became one of crypto’s earliest believers (3:41)
Cathie Wood, the founder of investment firm Ark Invest, has flagged what she sees as a blind spot in how Wall Street is covering Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure company.
Writing on X on August 9, Wood said she found it striking that Cloudflare's latest earnings call included no mention of, or questions about, stablecoins, which she called the "monetization enabler of this new world order."
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to hold a steady value, usually pegged to the U.S. dollar.
Wood argued that research teams divided by sector, such as those covering software and cybersecurity separately from financial services, need to work together as these technologies increasingly overlap.
Fascinating about the Cloudflare call was no mention or question about stablecoins, the monetization enabler of this new world order! Research teams siloed by sectors or industries, like software/cybersecurity and financial services need to collaborate as technologies converge. https://t.co/gAsiQADMJv
— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) August 9, 2026
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Why the stablecoin angle matters here
Her point lands because Cloudflare, best known for speeding up and protecting websites, has been slowly moving deeper into stablecoin-powered payments.
On July 1, the company announced its Monetization Gateway, a tool that lets Cloudflare customers charge for access to web pages, datasets, APIs, or other digital assets. At launch, those payments settle in stablecoins using x402, an open payment protocol Cloudflare is building with a coalition of more than 25 industry partners.
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The company went further on August 4, unveiling programmable stablecoin wallets for AI agents, which let autonomous software hold funds and pay for online services on their own.
Even Cloudflare's earnings framing pointed that way. Announcing results on August 6, co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said the web is being rewritten for machine-to-machine traffic and described Cloudflare as building "the payment rails for the Agentic Internet," without tying that vision explicitly to stablecoins.
That gap is what caught Wood's attention. Despite Cloudflare's steady push into stablecoin-powered payments, the topic went unmentioned on the call itself, an omission she found hard to square with where the company appears to be heading.
A strong quarter, then a fundraise
Meanwhile, Ark itself bought Cloudflare shares on August 7, adding roughly 114,000 shares through its flagship Ark Innovation ETF, as per data shared on X by Ark Invest Tracker.
The stock had surged to a 52-week high of $324.73 last Friday after a strong second quarter, in which revenue rose 36% year-over-year to $696.1 million and the company lifted its full-year outlook to between $2.86 billion and $2.87 billion.
Cloudflare traded around $302 on Monday, up 0.33%, after announcing plans to raise about $2.175 billion through convertible notes, a move that raised some concern about share dilution.
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