How to Publish a Paid API for AI Agents Using MCP and AgenticTrade

How to Publish a Paid API for AI Agents Using MCP and AgenticTrade Most API monetization guides assume your consumers are humans who browse a marketplace, read your docs, and manually configure auth. That assumption is becoming outdated. AI agents do not browse. They query a service registry at runtime, read machine-structured MCP tool descriptors, execute calls autonomously, and handle payment without a human in the loop. The infrastructure for that workflow is what AgenticTrade is building. This article walks through the practical steps to register your API on AgenticTrade — an MCP-native marketplace where AI agents can discover, authenticate, and pay for your API per call in USDC. What MCP Actually Does Here MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a protocol for exposing tools and data sources to LLM-based agents in a standardized format. An MCP server is essentially a structured interface that declares: What functions your API exposes (tool names and descriptions) What input parameters eac