Those are mostly at a different layer. You can speak Thrift or Avro or Protobuf over stdio or HTTP or TCP or carrier pigeon. gRPC spans layers, and it uses HTT

Those are mostly at a different layer. You can speak Thrift or Avro or Protobuf over stdio or HTTP or TCP or carrier pigeon. gRPC spans layers, and it uses HTTP in a more intrusive way than even MCP does — it expects to own the entire URL space at the IP/port in question. Using gRPC in a nontrivial way for MCP would be fairly heavy-weight: you would probably need to set up reflection and figure out how to bind all the MCP calls to it unless you just use it as a tunnel.