The Model Context Protocol won the standards war nobody quite declared. Now its ecosystem is doing what young ecosystems do: sprawling, deduplicating, and waiting for someone to build the money layer.
Two years in, the Model Context Protocol has become the default answer to "how does an agent reach a tool" — adopted well beyond Anthropic, wired into every serious coding agent, with thousands of servers in the wild. The predictable next act followed: everyone built a directory. Community registries, curated "awesome" lists, venture-backed marketplaces, and an official registry all now index overlapping slices of the same long tail.
That sprawl is resolving the way sprawls do. Discovery is consolidating toward a small number of places that offer more than a list — the official registry for canonical metadata, and a couple of aggregators that add real signal: install counts, security scanning, maintenance status, compatibility notes. A directory that is only a directory is a feature, not a business, and the feature is being absorbed.
What still doesn't exist is the money layer. Almost every MCP server is free, unmetered, and unmaintained the moment its author's attention moves on. There's no standard way to charge for a high-value server, no settlement between the agent that consumed a tool call and the developer who built it, and no economic reason for quality to compound. Compare app stores at the same age: payment rails arrived, and the ecosystem professionalized within two years.
Protocols win when boring infrastructure grows around them. MCP has the spec, the adoption, and the sprawl; it's still missing the economics. Whoever ships the layer that lets a great MCP server earn its keep will own a disproportionate share of how agents reach the world.