The New MCP Headers Are a Gift to Gateways
In short, buried in the transport section of the MCP 2026-07-28 release candidate are three changes that matter more to infrastructure teams than to anyone else: mandatory Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers, cache-control-style ttlMs and cacheScope fields, and standardized W3C Trace Context propagation. Together with the stateless core, they turn MCP from a protocol that gateways had to fight into one that meets them halfway.