Give your AI assistant live crypto market data in 2 minutes (MCP, no API key)

Disclosure: I work with Everstrike, the exchange whose MCP server this uses. The server is free and read-only, and you don't need an account.

Ask an AI assistant "what's the ETH funding rate right now?" and it will either guess or tell you it can't browse. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) fixes that: you give the assistant tools it can call, and it fetches the real answer.

This post connects an MCP client to a public market-data server, then shows a few prompts that work well and two gotchas that will save you some debugging.

What you get

The server at https://mcp.everstrike.xyz/mcp exposes 10 read-only tools:

No tool can place orders or read an account, so connecting it can't touch anyone's funds.

Step 1: check it from the terminal

The server speaks JSON-RPC over HTTP and is stateless, so a single request works with no handshake:

curl -sX POST https://mcp.everstrike.xyz/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list","params":{}}'

You should see the ten everstrike_* tools. Note the Accept header: it must list both application/json and text/event-stream, or you get a 406.

Step 2: add it to your client

Cursor: add this to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or the project's .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "everstrike": { "url": "https://mcp.everstrike.xyz/mcp" }
  }
}

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http everstrike https://mcp.everstrike.xyz/mcp

Claude Desktop: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, and paste the URL.

Restart the client and the tools appear.

Step 3: ask it things

Prompts that work well:

• "What are the mark price and funding rate for USD_BTC_PERP right now?"
• "Pull 1h candles for USD_ETH_PERP over the last day and describe the trend in two sentences."
• "Compare the order book depth on USD_BTC_PERP and USD_ETH_PERP. Which is thinner within 1% of mid?"
• "Has funding on USD_ETH_PERP been positive or negative over the last few hours?"

The assistant picks the tool, calls it and answers from the data, and most clients show you the raw tool call so you can check it.

Gotcha 1: market names

Perpetuals are named quote-first: the BTC perp is USD_BTC_PERP, not BTC_USD_PERP. Spot markets are base-first (USDT_USD).

The server resolves friendly spellings like XRP/USD, but only when they're unambiguous. ETH/USD matches both a spot market and the perp, so the server asks for the exact key:

"ETH/USD" matches more than one market: ETH_USD, USD_ETH_PERP. Use the exact key.

Tip: tell the assistant "use exact market keys from everstrike_pairs", or name them yourself.

Gotcha 2: timestamps are milliseconds

everstrike_ohlcv takes start and end in Unix milliseconds. Send seconds and you're asking for candles from 1970, and you get an empty list without an error. If an assistant returns "no data", this is usually why.

Also, candles default to mark price, not last traded price. On quiet markets the last price can sit still for hours, so mark gives a more honest series. Pass "price": "last" if you want trades.

Limits worth knowing

• 10 requests per second per IP (bursts to 20), 16 concurrent connections.
• Responses are capped at 60,000 characters and truncated from the end. If a response says it was truncated, narrow the request (fewer markets, a smaller limit).

Where to go from here

Market data in your assistant is useful on its own: research, explaining funding, checking a level before you do anything. If you want to go further, Everstrike also lets you write a strategy as a plain-English prompt that an AI evaluates on a schedule, with every decision logged with its reasoning: https://everstrike.io/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=mcp

MCP docs: https://docs.everstrike.xyz/ai/mcp.md

Derivatives trading carries a high risk of loss. Everstrike isn't available in the US, Canada, Denmark and other restricted regions. Nothing here is financial advice.