The Model Context Protocol shipped its 2026-07-28 specification on July 28, dropping the handshake and session ID that made MCP a stateful, stream-holding protocol since launch
Every request now carries its own protocol version and identity, so requests can land on any server behind a plain load balancer with no shared session store required
OAuth and OIDC got real hardening, tool and prompt lists became cacheable, and Tasks moved into a formal, versioned extensions framework
Tier 1 SDKs already support it, and combined MCP SDK downloads have crossed roughly half a billion a month, four times where they stood at the start of the year
The Change That Actually Matters: MCP Stopped Being Stateful
