Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Open-sourced by Anthropic on 25 November 2024. MCP is a discovery and execution protocol. It is not itself a payment protocol.

What an agent can do: Give models a standard way to list and call tools, resources and prompts.
Networks: Transport-agnostic; not a settlement network
Live?: Documented as live or generally available.
Evidence: Primary Anthropic publication. Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway (1 July 2026) treats MCP tools as chargeable resources beside APIs and pages.
Last verified: 7 September 2026