Marketplace & A2A

The Lantern Marketplace is a registry of public agents and MCP servers that you can discover, preview, and deploy to your own tenant. Combined with A2A Agent Cards, it enables cross-platform agent discovery and interop.

What is the Marketplace

The Marketplace is accessible from the dashboard sidebar under Marketplace. It contains two sections:

• Agent Marketplace -- community-published agents that you can preview, fork, and customize. Each listing shows the agent's description, connectors, model requirements, and average cost per run.
• MCP Marketplace -- a registry of Model Context Protocol servers you can add as connectors. Browse by category (search, data, code, productivity) and install with a single click.

How A2A Agent Cards work

Lantern implements the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol for cross-platform agent discovery. Every deployed agent can expose an Agent Card -- a machine-readable JSON document describing its capabilities, inputs, outputs, and endpoint.

Agent Card endpoints

• GET /v1/agents/{name}/card -- returns the A2A card for a specific agent
• GET /.well-known/agent.json -- well-known discovery endpoint that returns the default agent card for the tenant

Card structure

{
  "name": "my-research-agent",
  "description": "Researches topics and produces summaries",
  "version": "1.2.0",
  "capabilities": ["text-generation", "web-search", "summarization"],
  "inputs": [{ "name": "query", "type": "string", "required": true }],
  "outputs": [{ "name": "summary", "type": "string" }],
  "endpoint": "https://my-agent.lantern.cloud/v1/run",
  "auth": { "type": "bearer" }
}

External platforms can fetch this card to understand what your agent does and how to invoke it, enabling seamless composition across different agent frameworks.

Publishing your agent

To publish an agent to the Marketplace:

1. Navigate to your agent's detail page in the dashboard.
2. Click Publish to Marketplace in the agent settings.
3. Fill in the listing metadata: category, tags, example inputs, and a README describing what the agent does.
4. Choose a visibility level: Public (anyone can see and fork) or Unlisted (only accessible via direct link).
5. Submit for review. Published agents appear in the Marketplace within minutes.

Discovering and forking agents

From the Marketplace page, you can:

• Browse agents by category (research, automation, customer support, coding, data analysis)
• Search by name, description, or tags
• Preview an agent's configuration, connectors, and sample outputs before forking
• Fork an agent to create a private copy in your tenant that you can customize

Forked agents are fully independent. You can modify instructions, swap models, add connectors, and redeploy without affecting the original.

Cross-platform interop

A2A Agent Cards enable interoperability beyond the Lantern ecosystem:

• Inbound -- external platforms can discover your Lantern agent via its /.well-known/agent.json endpoint and invoke it using the standard A2A protocol.
• Outbound -- Lantern agents can call external A2A agents using the ctx.subagent() API with a remote agent URL. The runtime fetches the remote card, validates compatibility, and routes the request.
• Composition -- build multi-agent workflows that span platforms. A Lantern orchestrator agent can delegate tasks to agents running on other frameworks, and vice versa.