MCP, A2A, the three ACPs, AP2, x402 and the payment-protocol contest.
Pantone 17-3938 Very Peri · Color of the Year 2022 · 3 pieces
Anthropic's Model Context Protocol reached 97 million monthly SDK downloads and a Linux Foundation home within 13 months of launch, and the dated record explains why a tool protocol won the first round of agent standardization.
7 min · 14 sources
Google's A2A protocol reached 150 organizations in production and 22,000 GitHub stars in its first year while three separate protocols named ACP fought over one acronym, and this dated ledger sorts the agent interoperability stack by scope, steward and settlement.
7 min · 14 sources
Six agent payment protocols launched in twelve months; this comparison dates each one, tabulates scope, settlement rails and governance, and argues that the signed mandate is the primitive that decides the contest.
8 min · 14 sources