Analysis: What is the MCP Registry and Its Future Development Direction
Today I saw news that MCP released an introduction to a registry. Details here: https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2025-09-08-mcp-registry-preview/
While I haven't participated deeply in the MCP ecosystem, I have been researching agent protocols continuously. From my perspective, here's a brief analysis:
First, let me characterize it: The MCP registry is more like a "DNS" for the MCP ecosystem, rather than an App Store.
The biggest difference between DNS and App Store is that DNS is more like a non-profit infrastructure, while App Store has very strong profit attributes.
The official positioning goal for the MCP registry is: to standardize the distribution and discovery methods of MCP servers. Before this, there were many MCP markets or aggregation platforms, but there has never been an official center and discovery mechanism. The MCP registry essentially builds a "DNS" for the MCP ecosystem, greatly lowering the connection barriers between MCP clients and servers.
Does the MCP registry charge fees? Currently it appears to be community-maintained and free. Whether it will charge fees in the future is uncertain.
Are MCP servers in the MCP registry trustworthy? The official statement is community-driven review with permissive licensing (easier for merchants, but without deep verification of information). Later, based on feedback, they will ban spam, malicious, or servers impersonating official ones. This means when you download an MCP server from the registry, it may not be completely guaranteed to be trustworthy. However, servers that haven't been removed after some time have certain guarantees.
It's uncertain whether the registry is MCP's final discovery mechanism. This approach differs significantly from A2A and ANP. Both A2A and ANP use RFC8615, designing a document under the well-known path of domain names to associate agents with domains, essentially using existing mature DNS and search engine discovery mechanisms.
Will this impact existing MCP navigation sites or markets? According to MCP's official statement, they don't intend to replace existing registries established by communities and enterprises. Existing registries (MCP markets) can use MCP's published specifications to build their own registries as MCP public sub-registries, freely expanding and enhancing data obtained from upstream MCP registries.
From the above, we can see that MCP is very concerned about ecosystem building, especially enterprises in the ecosystem. Existing navigation sites and markets may need to find good differentiated positioning, as the value brought by simple "aggregation" might be absorbed by the official registry. They need to find unique added value.
Regarding the two technical routes for server or agent discovery: one is the registry approach, like MCP's registry or technologies like Agent Name Service; the other is extending existing DNS, like A2A and ANP using RFC8615. Both technical routes have their pros and cons. However, they currently both follow openness principles, rather than closed ecosystems like App Store.