Protocol research. Every protocol, reviewed as it ships.
Protocol research · Weekly review
Why we run it
Agentic commerce runs on protocols that are new, published by different companies and still changing. Advice written against last quarter's version of a spec can send a merchant in the wrong direction. We needed a standing habit, not a one-off study, to keep our understanding current.
How the review works
Every week, senior management leads a live session with the team, presented as a slide deck. The review covers the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) from OpenAI and Stripe, Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that agents use to call tools, and the card-network rails being built for agent payments.
For each release, the session asks two questions: what changed, and what it now asks of a merchant's catalog, checkout and payments.
- Release
- Review
- Requirements
- Connectors
What it has produced
Two working documents come out of the review and are kept up to date as the specs move.
The first is an overlap map: where the protocols ask the same thing of a merchant and where they diverge. The second is a merchant requirements list: for each protocol, what it needs from the catalog, the checkout and the payment setup.
Both feed straight into our engineering. The way we build connectors follows what the review finds, so a change in a spec reaches our code through a known path instead of a surprise.
Why the overlap matters
A merchant rarely needs just one protocol. Where the overlap map shows a shared requirement, the work is done once and carries across. Where it shows a difference, we can plan for it before it turns into rework.
How this helps our clients
Our assessments check a merchant against the current requirements list, not a snapshot from launch day. When we recommend a protocol, or more than one, the advice reflects what the specs ask for this week, and the connectors we install are built to match.