Hedera Network MCP stays on testnet as mainnet runs v0.78.1

Hedera Network MCP is the testnet endpoint on Hedera's MCP page for an agent that needs a transaction built and passed to a wallet, and that endpoint is a separate product from the consensus-node release that status.hedera.com records as complete on mainnet at v0.78.1. Filecoin's Solstice upgrade and CDK Besu on Ethereum mainnet changed software on networks that already settle. Hedera's hosted agent URL remains a testnet service beside a mainnet release whose maintenance window closed on October 16, 2026.

What the hosted server hands a wallet

Hedera documents the server in its Network MCP guide at https://agentic-testnet-mcp.hedera.com/mcp. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the interface for clients that can finish an OAuth 2.1 wallet login, including Claude, Cursor, Codex, and ChatGPT. The guide says the server builds and freezes the transaction, then delivers it to the user's wallet, and the wallet both signs and submits it. The product page groups the surface as more than 40 tools across accounts, consensus topics, tokens, and queries. Operators add the server URL alone, since the guide says the account is proven by the wallet sign-in and tells them to leave additional request headers untouched.

The server holds no Hedera keys of any kind, never submits a transaction, and never sees your signature.

That sentence is Hedera's custody note. The tool table adds smart-contract calls, Hedera Token Service (HTS) mint and transfer methods, and Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) topic methods. HashPack and Kabila are the wallets named in the setup, and sign-in uses WalletConnect on single-key accounts. The hosted server is limited to testnet, with mainnet use pointed at a self-hosted Hedera Agent Kit MCP server. The approval window is about 180 seconds, and a walletVerifiable flag is true for an HBAR transfer, a token operation, or a topic operation, and false for contract calls and file operations. Example prompts include sending 1 HBAR and creating a fungible token with an initial supply of 1,000.

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Hedera Payments MCP, on the same page, is marked coming soon and is paired with Hedera Agent Accounts, a different product. The October 8, 2026 post describes daily caps, per-transaction maximums, and an allowlist on a smart contract, with limited partner validation on testnet in Q4 2026. The hosted Network MCP guide locates spend control in the wallet prompt and describes those caps as absent from this server. Dataline's seed round for an AI-agent data network is the neighbouring wager on shared data for agents.

What v0.78.1 changed on mainnet

Hedera's status page scheduled mainnet maintenance for Friday, October 16, 2026 at 17:00 UTC, for about 40 minutes, and warned of some disruption to network services. The completion update at 17:26 UTC says the upgrade to v0.78.1 finished successfully. Status records a testnet upgrade to v0.78.0 as completed on October 8, 2026, matching the banner that reads "TESTNET UPDATED: OCTOBER 8, 2026". The services release notes say release v0.78 shipped to mainnet as v0.78.1. The Hiero consensus-node repository published the v0.78.1 release on October 22, 2026, six days after that completion update, so dating the cutover from the GitHub page alone puts the window on the wrong day.

Request timeouts toward Block Nodes scale with block size, and the block buffer gains a cap on total bytes beside the block-count limit. Build 0.78.1 raises the maximum number of consensus topics from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000. Initial Cross-Ledger Proof Relay (CLPR) groundwork ships disabled behind the clpr.enabled flag, so behaviour stays in place while operators leave the flag off. Hashgraph's CLPR page expands the initials as Cross-Ledger Protocol and describes the project as in development, so the flag is node groundwork rather than a finished path for moving value. Ingest rejects malformed or deeply nested keys, oversized transactions, and throttle-bypassing queries, while allowance, fractional-fee, and royalty-fee calculations are brought into line. Staking-reward double-payment bugs and NFT transfer-list accounting bugs are on the fix list from that October 16 window.

A further mainnet window

The status item created on October 22 schedules a mainnet upgrade to v0.78.2 for Wednesday, October 28, 2026 at 17:00 UTC, for about 40 minutes. The release notes that document builds 0.78.0 and 0.78.1 stop short of a 0.78.2 section, so the contents of that later window sit outside the notes a developer can read there today. Operators can verify two separate facts: a testnet Network MCP whose wallet signs every state-changing call, and a mainnet node on v0.78.1 whose topic cap, block-buffer byte cap, and staking fixes have already reached the public ledger.

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