GM people, and welcome to the 11th issue of "The ContextVM World", your biweekly appointment to discover everything you need to know about ContextVM, MCP, Nostr, and everything in between!
In today's update, we cover the latest news from ContextVM. In particular, we discuss our first contribution to the upstream MCP repository, how we are trying to reduce the amount of dependencies in our SDK, our brand new documentation pages, and a new Explicit Payment Gating mode for CEP-8 that lets AI agents decide whether a call is worth paying for.
We also cover the features we are currently working on. Notably, the team is looking into MCP Bundles (MCPB), a way to package and deploy local MCP servers.
Finally, we will share articles, blogs, and posts talking about CVM and the most interesting news from the internet regarding the MCP ecosystem, AI agents, and more!
Let's start!
News from ContextVM 📰
A list of updates, releases and new cool features.
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Contributing Upstream: We recently shipped an improvement to the official MCP rust-sdk repository! PR858 was merged last week, bringing our experience as users to our major upstream dependency. The benefits of FOSS at work!
This PR adds support for resetting a request timeout in case a long-running operation is ongoing. Previously, the SDK would make no difference between an offline peer which was not responding, and one that was just actively progressing to conclude a task. Our work refreshes the request timeout anytime the peer sends some progress, signaling that it is still busy and not offline.
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Fewer dependencies: We published a new release family, v0.12.x. We decided to fork the official MCP ts-sdk and to strip out all those parts that are not needed in our project. What does this mean? Fewer unnecessary dependencies to the benefit of lightweight and web clients! Check out our fork!
We then released new versions up to v0.12.3. We introduced progress notifications to avoid timeouts for oversized transfers, we fixed a conflict between progress tokens and open streams, and we improved handling of encryption size limits.
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Explicit Payment Gating for CEP-8: We just released ContextVM SDK 0.13.0, shipping full support for a new CEP-8 mode called Explicit Payment Gating. Until now, CEP-8 let servers charge for their tools, but only "behind the scenes", with payment handled silently by the transport layer. That is great for a wallet app, but not for an AI agent that actually needs to decide whether a call is worth paying for. With this update, a paid call returns a clean "Payment Required" error (
-32042) that carries human-readable instructions and one or more payment options, inspired by HTTP's 402 status code. The agent reads the instructions, pays the invoice its own way, and retries the same call, with no special SDK knowledge required. The change is fully backward compatible, as the existing silent flow stays the default. Check out the announcement, the CEP-8 spec, and the explicit gating guide to learn more! -
Diátaxis: We also worked on improving how our documentation is structured. We decided to follow diátaxis, a systematic approach to technical documentation authoring, with the aim to provide more clarity for our users. Moreover, we added comprehensive documentation for our Rust SDK.
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Bindings are here: We finally merged bindings in our Rust SDK! In particular, the new contextvm-ffi crate is exposing bindings to C, Python, Kotlin, and Swift, bringing CVM functionalities to mobile development.
News from the ContextVM Ecosystem 🗞️
Find all the projects leveraging ContextVM on ContextVM/awesome.
- MLS coordinator in the browser: Open-source contributor sandwich developed a new MLS coordinator that runs directly in a browser tab, no need for a server to run it. An ephemeral coordinator that exist only for as long as it is needed. Check out this note to know more!
What’s Next for ContextVM? ⏭️
Let’s take a look at the features currently being implemented! Check out our Roadmap to always be up-to-date with the latest developments!
- Our team is currently looking into MCP Bundles (MCPB), a packaging format to easily distribute local MCP servers and provide one-click deployment. The team is currently implementing a new command into CVMI to enable developers to package local MCP servers into distributable bundles.
Who is Talking about ContextVM? 📢
A curated list of articles, blog posts, and notes about ContextVM and its ecosystem.
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CVM has been mentioned on Nostr Compass #27, a weekly newsletter covering everything going on in the Nostr ecosystem. Specifically, the article provides information on our latests SDK release.
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We recently published a demo on how to use our new LLM chat interface as a music research tool, by leveraging the WaveFunc MCP server. Try it out for yourself!
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aljaz shared a new experiment born out of a hackathon: kvaq, bringing local inference to mobile with ContextVM support for tool use and discovery. See the note!
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SkateSpots built Sasquatch, a bot powered by CVM that helps you find skate spots. Check out the note!
Interesting resources from the web 🤖
A curated list of resources we found interesting.
- "What AI Can Never Be": A great talk by John Vervaeke discussing intelligence and what AI can never be.
Find out more about ContextVM:
- Check out our website for documentation, blog posts, and more.
- Join our Signal group
- Follow ContextVM on Nostr
- Subscribe to our Substack. Help us spread the word!
- Check out our GitHub repositories and leave us a ⭐