Two MCP proxy servers appeared in the same scan. They solve different problems for different reasons, and together they outline the middleware layer forming between AI agents and MCP servers.
MCP-Hive Proxy (score: 59) is a commercial marketplace gateway from Gary Weiss (namel, Tel Aviv). Developers publish MCP servers to mcp-hive.com with pricing; AI agents discover and call tools through the proxy; every call is tracked and billed. The pitch from the site:
"Welcome to MCP monetization done right. AI applications pay per request, providers earn per response. We handle the rest."
— mcp-hive.com
Weiss posted a Show HN about it — zero comments, posted from a new account. The platform launches March 8, 2026. One-person org, no funding info, no customers yet. The proxy is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the marketplace it connects to is centralized and proprietary. This bets that MCP servers will become valuable enough to charge for, and that developers will accept a middleman.
my-cool-proxy (score: 59, 9 stars) solves a purely technical problem. Built by Kara (karashiiro), a developer known in the Final Fantasy XIV modding community as the creator of Universalis, a crowdsourced market board API. The README identifies the issue clearly:
"Tool descriptions bloat the context window. This is a problem with how most agents integrate with MCP. Rather than implementing abstractions that enable tools to be loaded as needed, most applications dump all MCP tools into the context at once."
— my-cool-proxy README
Kara's proxy uses progressive disclosure — agents discover servers, then tools, then tool details incrementally. The novel bit: an embedded Lua interpreter lets agents compose multi-step workflows in a single execute() call, saving the context overhead of intermediate reasoning. MIT-licensed, published on npm, created December 2025 — two months older than MCP-Hive.
One proxy adds a business layer. The other removes a technical bottleneck. Neither knows the other exists. But both point to the same conclusion: the MCP ecosystem is developing a middleware tier. As the registry crosses 2,400 servers, the raw protocol isn't enough — something has to sit between agents and the growing catalog to handle discovery, routing, billing, or just keeping the context window from overflowing. Whether that layer ends up commercial, open-source, or both is one of the more interesting open questions in the ecosystem right now.
Sources: Gary Weiss — GitHub · MCP-Hive · Show HN · Kara — GitHub · my-cool-proxy repo · npm · Scorecard: MCP-Hive · Scorecard: karashiiro