MCP (Model Context Protocol)

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard developed to let AI agents and language models interact with external tools, APIs, and data sources through a typed, discoverable interface. Instead of an agent being handed raw HTTP endpoints and having to figure out authentication, request shapes, and error handling from a doc page, the MCP server exposes each capability as a named tool with a JSON schema for arguments and a defined result type.

The value for AI agents is reliability. Without MCP, agents interact with the world by either scraping web pages (fragile), asking the user to click through a UI (defeats automation), or being pre-programmed with hard-coded API knowledge (does not generalize). With MCP, an agent discovers the available tools at runtime, receives type information about arguments, and can call them safely — errors are structured, not text blobs.

The value for the service is safer automation. When an AI agent calls a swap API via MCP, both sides speak the same schema. The agent cannot "hallucinate" an endpoint that does not exist; the service can validate every request against a schema before executing. This is the difference between "an agent that tries to use your API" and "an agent that reliably uses your API."

SwapZilla ships an MCP server that exposes quote, order, and status endpoints as typed tools. AI agents can quote a swap across all integrated providers, place an order, and track execution — without web-scraping the swapzilla.io front-end.