Your MCP Server Has No Network Identity. Here's Why That's a Problem.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) crossed 97 million monthly SDK downloads. Every major AI provider adopted it. It solved a real problem: how do agents invoke tools and retrieve context in a standardized way?

But MCP is a protocol for what agents can do. It says nothing about where they are or how they find each other.

Your MCP server lives at a URL. That URL is hardcoded in your agent's config. If it changes, your agent breaks. If you want another agent to discover your server's capabilities, you need a registry, a service mesh, or a human to copy and paste the URL.

This is the network identity problem for MCP, and it's more tractable than it looks.

What MCP Actually Does (and Doesn't Do)

MCP standardizes the tool-calling layer. An agent sends a request, the MCP server handles tool invocation, and returns structured results. The protocol defines:

• Tool schemas (what parameters each tool accepts)


• Resource definitions (what data sources are available)


• Request/response format

It does not define:

• How agents discover MCP servers without prior knowledge


• How MCP servers maintain stable identities across IP changes


• How multiple agents route to the same MCP server based on capability


• How MCP servers establish encrypted tunnels to requesting agents

These are network problems, and MCP isn't a network protocol.

The Hardcoded URL Problem

Most MCP deployments today look like this:

{

  "mcpServers": {

    "my-tool-server": {

      "url": "https://api.mycompany.com/mcp",

      "apiKey": "sk-..."

    }

  }

}

This works for a single agent with a fixed configuration. It breaks down when:

• The server moves to a new host


• You want to run multiple instances behind a load balancer


• Another agent outside your org wants to use the same tool


• You want to discover all MCP servers with a given capability type


• You're building a marketplace of tools that agents can discover dynamically

The current solution is to build a registry. A centralized service that maps tool names to URLs. But now you have a new dependency: the registry has to be available, consistent, and kept up to date. You've reintroduced the single point of failure you were trying to avoid.

What a Network Identity Gives an MCP Server

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