The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify

Original: The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify

6.3K views · Jul 18, 2025 · 18:08 min · Watch on YouTube ↗

Takeaway

MCP's tool discovery enables agent-to-tool interaction at scale, but a real agentic economy requires solving agent identity and payments — likely via marketplaces before central rails mature.

Summary

Apify is a marketplace of ~5,000 'actors' (Dockerized tools with defined I/O, e.g. Google Maps scraper) accessible via SDKs and now MCP
MCP's tool discovery is the killer feature distinguishing it from OpenAPI — agents dynamically discover tools instead of stuffing all 5k into context
For a true agentic economy, agents need to find AND pay for services autonomously; today they still need human-provisioned API tokens
Discusses three approaches to agent identity/payments: agents subscribing themselves (impractical), central identity+payment providers (Coinbase x402, Stripe, Visa/Mastercard), or centralized marketplaces

mcpapifyagentic-economy

Original description

Thanks to MCP and all the MCP server directories, agents can now autonomously discover new tools and other agents. This lays down the foundation for the future agentic economy, where businesses will sell to autonomous agents (B2A) and eventually agents will sell to other agents (A2A).

But one key part is still missing: agents do not have a standard way to subscribe to external services and pay for them.

In this talk, we’ll show how to give agents full autonomy to discover and pay for new external MCP-enabled services, even if those services don’t support it, using a little-known MCP server nesting capability. We’ll also cover how to monetize AI agents and the B2A/A2A business models.



---related links---

https://x.com/jancurn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jancurn/
https://blog.apify.com/author/jancurn/
https://apify.com/

Timestamps
[00:00] Emergence of Intelligence

[02:42] Apify and the Agentic Economy

[07:30] Challenges and Solutions for Agent Autonomy

[11:50] Demo of Apify's MCP Integration

[15:52] Monetization and Future Outlook