A Measurement Study of Model Context Protocol Ecosystem
Hechuan Guo, Hao, Yongle, Yue Zhang, Minghui Xu, Lv, Peizhuo, Jiezhi Chen, Xiuzhen Cheng · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2025
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem now exceeds 14,800 publicly addressable servers, but reliability claims about individual servers are typically issued as point-in-time snapshots or static manifest scores. This paper describes the continuous behavioral telemetry methodology operated by Dominion Observatory since 2026-04-08, in which (a) an active probe fleet pings registered MCP endpoints on a fixed interval, (b) agent-reported interaction outcomes are recorded under an explicit provenance schema, and (c) the resulting time-series is exposed as a CTEF v0.3.2 §4.5 evidence_provider with a re-runnable conformance harness anchored in git history. Across 38 days of operation we report 88,216 interaction records over 14,820 tracked servers, with self-attested conformance vectors published at stable workers.dev endpoints. The methodology is differentiated from existing MCP empirical studies (which are snapshot-based) by three properties: continuity, commit-anchored proof, and cross-validation across four independent specs (CTEF v0.3.2 §4.5, x402 Trust-Provider Interface v0.1 PR #2300, A2A evidence_ref v1.0, ERC-8004 endpoint-health attestation v1.0). All data substrates, schemas, and verification scripts are publicly fetchable on free-tier infrastructure.