Thoughts on agent infrastructure, MCP, and the future of autonomous AI.
10,000+ MCP servers have no way to charge for their tools. MCP billing is the missing layer that turns open-source tools into sustainable businesses. The 7 primitives every billing solution needs.
Should you build your own MCP billing or use a marketplace? An honest comparison of time, cost, features, and trade-offs — including when building your own is the better call.
Every MCP marketplace will have metering. But metering is the easy part. The hard part — provider verification, signed receipts, SLA scoring, dispute resolution — is what separates real infrastructure from payment processors.
Adversa AI found 43% of MCP servers vulnerable to command injection. Schneier mapped a 7-stage promptware kill chain. OWASP released an agentic AI framework. The agent security crisis is here — and it demands trust infrastructure, not just patches.
From open billing specs to proprietary marketplaces to DIY Stripe — six approaches to MCP monetization compared on setup, trust, lock-in, and cost. Plus why the 43% vulnerability rate means billing is a security problem.
The web has robots.txt. The agent ecosystem needs humans.txt — a machine-readable file that tells bots who the real human behind a service is. Trust starts with accountability.
Coinbase shipped Agentic Wallets. x402 embeds payments in HTTP. But 90% of developers don't want crypto. Here's the case for Stripe-native agent wallets with proper accounting, policy engines, and gift links.
We built Agent Bazaar in 5 days. A billing proxy, trust layer, open spec, and public marketplace. Here's what we learned about sub-cent metering, the 10% fee, and why open standards beat walled gardens.
How we built provider verification, SLA tracking, dispute resolution, and composite trust scores. A deep technical walkthrough of the trust primitives no one else is building.
A deep dive into the open MCP billing standard: meter events, receipts, pricing schemas, and trust scores — the primitives that give every MCP server a real business model.
Step-by-step tutorial: install the SDK, wrap your existing MCP server with billing middleware, set per-call or per-token pricing, and start earning from AI agent traffic. Copy-paste code included.
10,000+ MCP servers with zero trust standards. Identity spoofing, prompt injection via tool responses, and zero accountability. Here's what a real trust layer looks like — and why NIST agrees it's urgent.
MCP is the fastest-growing protocol in AI, but it has no monetization standard. Builders can't charge for their tools. Agents can't discover and pay for tools programmatically. Here's why Agent Bazaar exists.
AI agents can autonomously complete 80-95% of tasks. But the last 5-20% hits real walls: CAPTCHAs, phone calls, niche UIs, identity verification. What if agents could just... hire a human?
VCs screen for agent fluency. Block laid off 4,000 citing AI. 10,000+ MCP servers can't monetize. The bottleneck isn't intelligence — it's the missing billing, trust, and identity infrastructure underneath.