State of MCP 2026: 15,000+ Servers, Hosted Runners, and the Quark Successor

Catalog size: 15,000+ MCPs

When MCP launched in late 2024 there were ~30 servers. Today Unyly aggregates 15,000+ unique MCPs from five sources: the Official Registry, npm, Smithery, PulseMCP, and Glama.

Distribution by category (top 5):

• Development: 4,200 MCPs (databases, deploy tools, IDE integrations)
• Productivity: 3,100 (Notion, Linear, todo, calendars)
• Communication: 2,400 (Slack, Discord, email)
• Data: 2,000 (web scraping, search, analytics)
• Design: 900 (Figma, image-gen, ElevenLabs)

Client adoption

MCP-aware clients we track:

• Claude Desktop (Anthropic) — primary target, deeplink protocol claude://
• Claude Code (CLI) — claude mcp add family
• Cursor IDE — cursor:// deeplinks
• VS Code — official MCP extension
• Cline (formerly Claude Dev)
• Continue.dev
• Zed
• Gemini CLI (experimental)

Cross-client install is the new default. Single-client install (e.g. Desktop Extensions) feels broken to power users.

Security: from "wild west" to scans

Late 2024: install anything from a GitHub gist, hope it doesn't exfiltrate your tokens.

2026: catalogs (including Unyly) auto-scan MCPs for leaked secrets in published code, suspicious dependencies, and abnormal package sizes. Verified badges become table stakes.

Hosted runners

The next frontier. Local stdio MCPs work for personal use, but:

• OAuth flows want a persistent web endpoint
• Team usage wants shared state
• Mobile-only users need cloud access

Hosted runners answer this. Unyly's implementation: managed Docker containers per MCP, OAuth handlers, billed per active hour.

Beyond MCP: Quark Protocol

MCP is fine for desktop-style tool calls. For production workflows it has architectural limits: no native streaming, no composition, no subscriptions, no backpressure, no multi-agent. The Quark Protocol (open spec by Unyly, MIT) addresses these — streaming-first, signed capability tokens, session resume, server-side pipeline composition. v1.0 stable, three SDKs (Go, TypeScript, Python). MCP adapter ships day one for zero-migration adoption. See unyly.org/quark.

What to install right now

If you're new to MCP, our top picks by use case:

• Coding: GitHub + filesystem + Postgres
• Research: Notion + web search + YouTube
• Operations: Slack + Linear + Sentry + Datadog
• Personal: Calendar + Notion + Gmail

Open unyly.org/browse and pick a stack.