@blackforge-so/mcp

A Model Context Protocol stdio server that puts BlackForge market-data in your agent's hands. The whole crypto market, in real time — nine spot venues (binance, bitget, bybit, coinbase, gate, kraken, kucoin, mexc, okx) and every column it measures, per pair per closed 5-minute window.

Every column is a measurement with a definition — order-book depth and shape, resting liquidity lifetimes, trade-explained vs book-implied volume, spreads, market-wide context — returned in-context so an agent can read the raw microstructure directly. It is a thin client over the public BlackForge /v1 API; it stores nothing and re-shapes nothing.

Quickstart

Add the server to your MCP client and paste an API key. Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) or Claude Code (.mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "blackforge": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@blackforge-so/mcp"],
      "env": { "BLACKFORGE_API_KEY": "bf_live_your_key" }
    }
  }
}

No install step — npx -y @blackforge-so/mcp fetches and runs the server on demand.

Where to get a key

Mint a key at app.blackforge.so → API. The server never creates keys; it reads BLACKFORGE_API_KEY from its environment. The blackforge_catalog tool works without a key, so you can verify the install before pasting one.

Tools

Plan entitlements (which venues, columns, and intervals a key may read) are enforced by the API. When a column is dropped because your plan does not include it, the tool result reports it in columnsOmitted so the agent understands why a key is absent. Venue- or interval-level restrictions come back as a clear tool error carrying the HTTP status and the server's message (including the upgrade URL, verbatim).

Charts

blackforge_series also ships an interactive chart. A host that implements the MCP Apps extension (io.modelcontextprotocol/ui) renders the result as a line chart with flagged buckets drawn in the same convention the BlackForge console uses; every other host sees exactly the JSON it saw before.

Nothing about the tool contract changes. The chart payload travels in the result's _meta, which is protocol metadata and reaches no model, so content[0].text is byte-identical whether or not your host renders widgets — the token cost of a series is the same either way. That is deliberate: structuredContent would have been the obvious home for it, but core MCP treats that field as server-produced result data, and a host without Apps support may hand it to the model, doubling the cost of a large series.

The chart is one self-contained HTML file with uPlot and all CSS inlined, because MCP Apps render under a deny-by-default CSP where an external <script> would simply never load. It is read-only and never calls back into the server: it draws the points it was given and cannot spend your row quota behind your back. Series longer than 2,000 points are decimated for the chart only — the tool still returns every point — and the payload says so rather than quietly thinning the line.

Data quality

When the API reports a row's measurement quality, blackforge_latest carries it through as a quality object (flags naming what went wrong in the window, contaminates listing which figures it flags) plus a plain-English qualityNote. blackforge_series aggregates it into one qualitySummary ({ flaggedBuckets, of, flags }) rather than repeating it on every point. Both keys are omitted entirely when nothing is flagged, and a quality.raw of 32768 means the row predates the quality rail and was never assessed — unknown, not bad. The flag decode table lives on the qualityFlags metric in blackforge_catalog, as a bits array; this server reads it from there and never carries a copy of its own.

Configuration

Local development

npm install
npm run build     # → dist/index.js (ESM, executable) + dist/widget/chart.html
npm test          # client unit tests + a stdio integration test

build runs tsup first and the widget's vite build second, and the order is load-bearing: tsup's clean wipes the whole of dist/, so reversing them deletes the widget and leaves the server serving a resource that is not there.

The integration test spawns the built server over stdio and drives it with the MCP client. Its data assertions need a local BlackForge API at http://localhost:3001/api; without one, those assertions are skipped and the tool-listing checks still run.

License

MIT