Glossary
MCP Registry
The official directory of Model Context Protocol servers, plus the ring of vendor and community catalogues around it. A listing says what a server is called, where to get it and how to authenticate.
General definition
The MCP Registry is the official, open catalogue of Model Context Protocol servers, run by the MCP project at registry.modelcontextprotocol.io. It stores metadata only: a server.json that says what the server is called, where its package lives (npm, PyPI or a container image) or what URL a remote instance answers on, which transport it speaks and how it authenticates. It does not host code. Names are namespaced in reverse-DNS form, for example io.github.org/server, and ownership of a namespace is proved through GitHub login or a DNS or HTTP challenge on the domain.
Publishing is done with the mcp-publisher command-line tool, and a public REST API lets clients and downstream directories read the catalogue. The registry opened in preview in September 2025 and froze its v0 API soon after. It is designed as a source of truth that other catalogues pull from, not as the only place a server is listed.
Around it sits a wider ecosystem of catalogues, each with its own review rules:
- Vendor directories inside the assistants: the Claude connector directory and the ChatGPT apps and connectors listing, both reviewed by the vendor before a server appears
- Developer-tool catalogues: the Docker MCP Registry and Catalog for containerised servers, the GitHub MCP Registry that VS Code reads, and editor directories such as Cursor’s
- Community lists: the awesome-mcp-servers repositories and directory sites that ingest the official registry automatically
A listing typically holds the name and description, the transport (a stdio package to run or a remote URL), the authentication method (none, API key or OAuth), any environment variables or arguments, and links to source and documentation. Some remote servers also publish a discovery document at /.well-known/mcp naming the endpoint, transport and auth options; that is a convention crawlers and clients read directly, not part of the specification. For a user, the value of a registry is trust and installability: a one-click install of a connector from a curated list instead of a URL copied from a forum post.
In the Ethora ecosystem
@ethora/mcp-server is published to npm and listed in the official MCP Registry under the dappros GitHub namespace, so any client that reads the registry can install the stdio version with npx -y @ethora/mcp-server. The hosted remote server at mcp.chat.ethora.com publishes its discovery document at /.well-known/mcp (mirrored on ethora.com), naming the endpoint, the transport and the three ways to authenticate, and serves the RFC 9728 protected-resource metadata that OAuth clients need. Details on the MCP server page.
Listings in the vendor directories are a separate, reviewed process with their own rules on tool metadata, destructive actions and data handling. The Ethora server was built against those rules: a title and behaviour annotations on all 90 tools, destructive tools flagged so clients confirm them, and no tool on the hosted surface that moves money or crypto. Installation snippets for Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code are on the tools reference.
