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.

Problem: Give models a standard way to list and call tools, resources and prompts.
How payment or discovery works: A host talks to servers that expose tools. tools/list describes input schema. tools/call does one job. Paid MCP is currently a market category of overlays (gateways, x402 challenge-handoff, MPP), not a single core spec feature.
Maintainers: Anthropic, MCP steering / spec community
Networks: Transport-agnostic; not a settlement network
Evidence of adoption: Primary Anthropic publication. Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway (1 July 2026) treats MCP tools as chargeable resources beside APIs and pages.
Last verified by zFinia: 7 September 2026

Until the MCP spec names a payment profile, “paid MCP” remains a category, not a standard.

Official documentation · Primary source · Explainer

Related: x402, mpp

Related intelligence

Editorial

TIER_A · unmet need · Public record

Paid MCP is still an overlay, not a core MCP feature

MCP specifies how tools are described and invoked. It does not specify settlement. Cloudflare’s gateway, x402 challenge-handoff and MPP all propose to hang payment on the same tool call. Until the MCP spec itself names a payment profile, “paid MCP” remains a market category, not a single standard.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)x402

Event 1 July 2026 · source 1 July 2026 · zFinia published 7 September 2026 · retrospective