Ephemeral Is Better — The ContextVM World #3 🌍
GM people, and welcome to the third issue of “The ContextVM World”, your biweekly appointment to discover everything you need to know about ContextVM, MCP, Nostr, and all in between!
In today’s update we cover ephemeral gift wraps, which have been recently merged into the protocol with CEP-19. This feature introduces an optional convention for CVM servers and clients to exchange encrypted messages using an ephemeral gift wrap kind. We also present the latest release family, v0.6.x.
We also discuss the latest news from the ecosystem, with a new MCP server to query Wolfram Alpha over Nostr, and the new feature being implemented in the CVM protocol, namely CEP-15, for common tools schema, and CEP-17, which provides a way for a server to publish its relay list.
Moreover, we will present a curated list of articles, blog posts, and notes talking about CVM and how it is changing the way we interact with MCP servers.
Finally, we will bring the latest news from the MCP ecosystem, including specification changes and new protocol additions. CVM is built on MCP, which means that we care about providing you up-to-date information from its thriving ecosystem.
Let’s start!
News from ContextVM 📰
A list of updates, releases and new cool features.
Ephemeral gift wraps are live on CVM: We recently merged CEP-19 proposal, which introduces an optional convention for CVM servers and clients to exchange encrypted messages using an ephemeral gift wrap kind. This is a major upgrade that provides more privacy in the communication between servers and clients, since it prevents relays to store the events.
Consequently, we also open a PR in the NIPs repository. The proposed modification aims to expand NIP-59 to include the convention for ephemeral gift wraps.
A NIP for CVM: Recently, we opened another PR on the NIP repository to formalize CVM as a minimal convention for transporting Model Context Protocol (MCP) JSON-RPC messages over Nostr. The proposal is waiting for feedback and reviews from other peers.
A new major release family for the CVM SDK: With the merging of CEP-19, we released a new major version family for the CVM SDK, v0.6.x.
Notably, v0.6.0 integrates support for ephemeral gift wraps, while maintaining compatibility with previous versions. We also released a patch version, v0.6.1.
Previously, we released v0.5.0, which added a single
paymentPolicyhook to make payment consent programmable.
News from the ContextVM Ecosystem 🗞️
Find all the projects leveraging ContextVM on ContextVM/awesome.
Relatr has been running for more than two weeks without missing a single beat. No crashes, no downtime. It just worked!
Wolfram Alpha is now available as a decentralized MCP server through CVM. Ask math, science, weather, conversions and more. Connect to the server here to test it out!
What’s Next for ContextVM? ⏭️
Let’s take a look at the features currently being implemented!
CEP-15: This enhancement proposal implements a standard for defining and discovering common tool schema. This aims to enable interoperability between multiple servers, standardizing tool interfaces that clients can recognize and use consistently. It leverages MCP’s
_metafield, RFC 8785 for deterministic hashing, and CEP-6 announcements for discovery, creating a marketplace where users can choose between multiple providers implementing the same standard tool interface.CEP-17: This enhancement proposal defines a relay list mechanism based on NIP-65 conventions. Servers can publish the list of relays they are connected to using kind
10002events, allowing clients to discover the appropriate relays for establishing connections. This solves the current limitation where users must know both a server’s public key and its relay URLs to connect.
Who is Talking about ContextVM? 📢
A curated list of articles, blog posts, and notes about ContextVM and its ecosystem.
Our Hacker News post, presenting ContextVM to the broader technical ecosystem. We are actively working to get more eyes on out project!
CVM has been mentioned on Nostr Compass #11 , a weekly newsletter covering everything going on in the Nostr ecosystem.
Travis Knot wrote an article describing CVM as a protocol for creating “permissionless digital lemonade stands”. With CVM, you do not need permission to build!
Our NIP proposal was mentioned in Nostr Biweekly Review (15-28 Feb 2026).
CVM has been mentioned in the Financial Freedom Report #110 by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF).
News from the MCP world 🤖
What is going on in the MCP world?
The Skills-over-MCP Interest Group is actively working to provide directions and guidelines on the possibility to provide Skills to agents as MCP resources. Contributors are focusing on the so-called skills-as-instructors, those that teach an agent how to use MCP tools correctly, without executing any code, with the aim to find a common ground to address distribution, portability, security and fragmentation. It is possible to find more information in the meeting notes.
Find out more about ContextVM:
Check out our website for documentation, blog posts, and more.
Join our Signal group
Follow ContextVM on Nostr, nostr:npub1dvmcpmefwtnn6dctsj3728n64xhrf06p9yude77echmrkgs5zmyqw33jdm
Subscribe to our Substack. Help us spread the word!
Check out our GitHub repositories and leave us a ⭐