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

The Basis Desk team launched a free, read-only remote MCP server at basisdesk.news/mcp that exposes crypto news and market data to AI agents in Claude, ChatGPT developer mode, Cursor, VS Code and Windsurf without an API key. The server offers seven tools — including search_news, latest_news, get_article, market_snapshot, whale_transfers, token_safety and daily_brief — and is implemented as a stateless JSON-RPC handler on Cloudflare Workers supporting protocol versions 2025-11-25 back to 2024-11-05. It is listed in the official MCP Registry as news.basisdesk/mcp and is free for personal and commercial use with attribution.

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 . | 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. 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" } } } stdio-only clients — bridge with mcp-remote : { "mcpServers": { "basis-desk": { "command": "npx", "args": "-y", "mcp-remote", "https://basisdesk.news/mcp" } } } 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" }}}' token safety 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 . 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 https://basisdesk.news/developers — feedback welcome in the comments.