The personal MCP

Almost every digital interaction you have today starts from scratch.

New app? It doesn’t know your taste in music, your shoe size, or your dietary restrictions. It makes assumptions, asks you to re-enter the same information, or worse, guesses incorrectly based on outdated proxies like age, location, or device type.

But the data already exists. You’ve spent years building it through what you buy, review, bookmark, comment on, return, reorder, mute, or save for later. The real issue is that there’s no canonical source of truth to represent you, and no standard way for the world to tap into that context in real time.

That’s the opportunity. Not another profile. Not another account. A private, personal server that hosts your living, breathing behavioral identity. One that you own.

The Personal MCP Server

Imagine a lightweight, cloud-hosted MCP (Model Context Protocol) instance configured for a single user: you.

This server holds your preferences, behaviors, history, goals, and constraints. It’s not just a data vault. It’s a context engine. When a site, app, or environment wants to tailor an experience for you, it queries this MCP endpoint. Your endpoint. With your consent.

Your past Yelp reviews. The cut of pants you typically favor. The brands you prefer not to see. Even soft traits like “open to trying new cuisine” or “prefers simplicity over novelty” can live here.

This becomes your persistent digital context layer. Structured, queryable, and portable.

Instead of starting over with every product or service, your world adapts around you in real time. Merchandising adjusts. Menus filter. Interfaces simplify. The system doesn’t just guess. It listens.

This Isn’t a Profile

What I’m describing is categorically different from the typical “profile” you have on every platform. Profiles are platform-bound. They don’t move. They don’t learn across environments. They age poorly. And they’re not programmable.

The personal MCP server is yours. It acts as a live contextual API for your preferences, updated continuously and available on your terms. You decide who accesses it, what traits are visible, how long they persist, and what systems can do with them.

You’re not integrating platforms with each other. You’re giving them temporary windows into a canonical truth. That changes everything.

It Could Be Tied to Soulbound Traits

Now layer in the idea of soulbound data. These are non-transferable, trust-anchored traits that define you across time. Your certifications. Your medical needs. Your purchase history with an ethical brand. Even values like “never accepts upsells” or “prefers eco options when available.”

This data could be cryptographically tied to your identity with a Soulbound token. Still private. Still consented. But now persistent across time and context.

An airline could query your travel anxiety flag and assign you a calm seat. A restaurant booking system could filter by your allergy profile. A future learning app could know your preferred learning style. These aren’t special-case integrations. They are all hitting the same endpoint: your MCP.

And that endpoint lives in infrastructure you control. Not a vendor.

What It Takes to Make This Work

Technically, here’s what this vision demands:

• A standardized schema for modeling personal context traits

• Real-time access control and permissioning protocols

• A personal context server framework (hosted or local)

• Middleware libraries for apps to consume MCP traits

• Privacy-preserving query layers (selective disclosure, ZK proofs, etc.)

• A user interface for managing trait visibility and intent

This isn’t hypothetical. All of these primitives already exist or are in development. What’s missing is cohesion, and the realization that this isn’t an enterprise problem. It’s a human one.

We’ve built marketing automation systems with more nuance than most human profiles.

That’s backwards.

What Changes When You Own Context

When the world queries you instead of guessing, everything simplifies.

Personalization becomes programmable. Trust becomes auditable. Consent becomes granular. Instead of signing into a site and watching it rebuild your preferences, your preferences arrive before you do.

This unlocks the kind of ambient intelligence we’ve been promised for two decades. But now it’s private by default, composable, and most importantly, yours.

We’ve been focused on building smarter apps. What if we built smarter selves?

This is not a theory. It’s a blueprint. The pieces are here. The Model Context Protocol is just one layer. What matters next is who builds the first truly personal MCP server. Whoever does will shift the gravity of personalization away from platforms and back to people.

If you’re thinking about the next big infrastructure play, start here. The server that runs your apps is important. But the server that runs you might be more valuable.