Protocols can make agentic exchanges easier to discover, describe, and coordinate. They do not create customer trust, distribution, or willingness to pay. A realistic founder treats interoperability as a reduction in integration cost, then proves the exchange with a narrow community before treating an open network as a market.
Protocols create lanes, not demand
MCP standardizes how AI applications connect to context and tools; A2A defines an interaction model for independent agent systems, including discovery, capabilities, authentication requirements, and task lifecycles. These are meaningful building blocks. They allow a venture to publish a legible capability instead of forcing every partner into a bespoke integration. But a protocol cannot decide whether a member should trust the result, whether a partner has an incentive to participate, or who supports a failed task.
Use openness strategically
Choose the smallest open boundary that helps the next real participant.
Core idea: Interoperability should improve the exchange before it expands the surface area.
- Publish a clear capability and authentication boundary
- Keep the critical quality and trust workflow owned
- Measure partner integration effort and task completion, not protocol adoption alone
- Do not expose a broad tool surface before permission and recourse work
Market design still comes first
Open protocols can make multi-party coordination technically possible. Market design answers the harder questions: who requests the work, who supplies it, what is accepted, who pays, and what happens when the agent fails. Start with a small group that already has a reason to exchange value. Add protocol support when it lowers a real coordination cost for that group.
The costly counterexample
A protocol can make an unready system easier to integrate. That is not always progress. If a partner can discover your agent but cannot understand its limits, approve its actions, or recover from a bad result, interoperability has widened the blast radius faster than trust. The owner of the exchange should be able to say no to a connection, constrain its permissions, and measure whether the new lane improves completed work rather than merely creating traffic.