MCP’s first birthday, still unpaid by default
One year after Anthropic’s MCP launch, the protocol was a default integration target. Monetization was still someone else’s 402. Directory quality became a practical buyer problem.
2025-11
What happened
One year after Anthropic’s MCP launch, the protocol was a default integration target. Monetization was still someone else’s 402. Directory quality became a practical buyer problem.
MCP TypeScript SDK release tags are a cadence signal
Maintainer releases, not GitHub stars, are the developer-activity evidence.
Third-party x402 directories appear beside official Bazaar
Indexing competition is a discovery-layer market of its own.