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Eight clients, thousands of servers, three funded incumbents, and a moat that runs on OAuth conformance. A dispatch from where things actually are.
Every few months the MCP ecosystem looks different enough that it's worth writing down what shape it has right now. This is what we see from the runtime — we host tens of thousands of MCP calls per day across every major client, so we have a specific vantage point.
Six MCP clients are in daily use for the majority of traffic on Cognoverge: Claude Desktop leads by a wide margin, followed by Cursor and Windsurf as a near-tie, then a tail of Cline, Continue, and Zed. ChatGPT Desktop announced MCP support this quarter — we're watching adoption there closely.
The client concentration matters because OAuth conformance work is per-client. Each new major client that ships MCP is a new conformance target. Since November 2024 we've added support for every client that ships — this pace is not slowing.
Two shapes of MCP servers: bridge servers that expose an existing API (Notion, GitHub, Linear, Stripe) as MCP tools, and compute servers that do their own work (a code review server, a search server, a synthesis server). Bridge servers dominate today by count. Compute servers dominate by revenue on the Monetize tier — no surprise, they add value callers pay for.
Three actors are seriously building MCP infrastructure:
Nobody yet is fully in the "marketplace where authors get paid" slot — that's the space we're opening. The take rate we set (5%) is deliberately below Stripe's marketplace norms (10-15%) to make monetization feel non-punitive.
The three visible changes: (1) ChatGPT Desktop shipping MCP took the protocol from "Anthropic-adjacent" to "interoperable across model vendors," which was the bet we were most nervous about. (2) The OAuth conformance matrix has stopped growing quickly — no new dialects since Zed shipped earlier this quarter. And (3) enterprise buyers have started asking for SSO + audit log retention as gating requirements, which pulled the Team tier onto our roadmap faster than we planned.
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