New SCP Protocol Cuts LLM Token Use by 3.45x Over JSON in Multi-Agent Systems

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A developer has released an open-source protocol called SCP (AGPLv3) designed to reduce token consumption in multi-agent LLM pipelines by replacing natural language and JSON messages with compact, deterministic ID-based strings. Benchmarked on the cl100k_base tokenizer, SCP uses 3.45 times fewer tokens than standard JSON, with gains reaching up to 9.89 times for non-English languages such as Hindi. The protocol works by encoding structured payloads against a fixed schema dictionary, raising explicit errors for unknown fields rather than making assumptions. It is currently an MVP intended for structured, enumerable data fields only and does not replace the initial natural language understanding step. The developer is inviting the community to stress-test the tool and contribute via issues and pull requests on GitHub.

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