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A free, no-key MCP server for crypto news and market data (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT)

#mcp #ai #cryptocurrency #api

Written with AI assistance by the Basis Desk team.

If you build agents that touch crypto, you have probably hit the same wall we did: models are confident about prices and events they cannot see, and scraping news sites is fragile. So we exposed our newsroom as a remote MCP server — free, read-only, no API key.

Endpoint: https://basisdesk.news/mcp (Streamable HTTP). It is also listed in the official MCP Registry as news.basisdesk/mcp.

What the tools return

Tool Use it for
search_news "What happened with X?" — full-text search over stories that are checked against primary sources (SEC/CFTC filings, court records, company and protocol releases)
latest_news Newest stories, filterable by category (bitcoin, ethereum, defi, regulation, institutions, security…)
get_article One story as Markdown with key points and numbered source links — for citations
market_snapshot Prices refreshed every minute, 1h/24h/7d change, market cap, dominance, Fear & Greed, ETH gas, BTC fees
whale_transfers Large ETH/stablecoin (≥ $5M) and BTC (≥ 100 BTC) transfers from our own chain scanner, with exchange labels
token_safety Contract risk signals (honeypot, taxes, mint/pause/blacklist powers, proxies) from GoPlus Security
daily_brief The day's 5–7 stories that mattered, for "crypto news today" prompts

All tools are annotated readOnlyHint: true; nothing writes anywhere.

Connect in one line

Claude (connectors), ChatGPT developer mode, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf — add a custom/remote MCP server with the URL above, or in JSON:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "basis-desk": { "type": "http", "url": "https://basisdesk.news/mcp" }
  }
}
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stdio-only clients — bridge with mcp-remote:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "basis-desk": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://basisdesk.news/mcp"] }
  }
}
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Raw JSON-RPC (handy for testing):

curl -s https://basisdesk.news/mcp -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"market_snapshot","arguments":{"symbols":["BTC","ETH"]}}}'
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Prompts that work well

  • "What did the SEC do on crypto ETFs this week? Cite sources."
  • "Is 0x6982508145454Ce325dDbE47a25d4ec3d2311933 safe to buy?" (the model calls token_safety)
  • "Any big exchange inflows of stablecoins today?"
  • "Give me the crypto news summary for today in five bullets."

How it is built

The server is a stateless JSON-RPC handler on Cloudflare Workers (protocol versions 2025-11-25 back to 2024-11-05, no sessions, CORS on). Stories come from an automated pipeline that clusters primary-source documents, drafts with an LLM and runs a grounding audit plus deterministic checks (citations, n-gram overlap, banned phrases) before publishing — so the answers your agent gets carry links you can verify.

There is also a server card at /.well-known/mcp.json, an OpenAPI spec for the plain JSON endpoints at /openapi.json, and /llms.txt.

Terms

Free for personal and commercial use with attribution ("Basis Desk" + the article URL). Please keep it to a few requests per second. Data can be delayed; nothing here is investment advice. Docs: https://basisdesk.news/developers — feedback welcome in the comments.

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