Our Real-Time Crypto Price MCP: 3 Sources, Kimchi Premium, Freshness
In short: The real-time price MCP is our service that gathers crypto prices from three sources — Upbit, CoinMarketCap, and CoinGecko — in a single call, and in a live snapshot on 2026-06-30 at 14:58 UTC it had 717 coins cached, the same Bitcoin ranged from 58,442 to 60,235 dollars across sources (about 3%), and it surfaces each source's freshness and failures
The real-time price MCP is our service that gathers crypto prices from three sources — Upbit, CoinMarketCap, and CoinGecko — in a single call, and in a live snapshot on 2026-06-30 at 14:58 UTC it had 717 coins cached, the same Bitcoin ranged from 58,442 to 60,235 dollars across sources (about 3%), and it surfaces each source's freshness and failures (CoinGecko returned 429) rather than hiding them.
In one line: do not trust one source; see three at once and price gaps, the kimchi premium, and data freshness all become visible.
What does the service do?#
Ask about one coin and it returns the price from three exchanges/aggregators side by side. The structure is simple — the agent makes one tool call, the MCP queries all three sources in parallel, and it merges them into a single response. The diagram below is that flow.
Below is a snapshot we measured just now via direct calls (in USD).
| Coin | Upbit | CoinMarketCap | CoinGecko | Source spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | $58,442 | $58,619 | $60,235 | ~3.1% |
| ETH | $1,564.19 | $1,564.87 | $1,613.45 | ~3.1% |
| USDC | $1.001 | $0.9996 | $0.9997 | ~0.1% |
Why is one source not enough?#
Because the same coin is priced differently across sources. In the snapshot above, BTC differed by about 1,800 dollars (roughly 3%) between sources, while the stablecoin USDC agreed within 0.1% across all three. That gap itself is a sanity check on data integrity. The bars below show the three BTC source values and the spread at a glance.
The Korea-specific kimchi premium is computed for you too: here it was BTC -3.88% and ETH -4.29%, a reverse premium where the Upbit won price sat below the global-implied price. A single source hides all of this.
Why expose freshness and failures?#
Because data is only useful when fresh, and hiding failures is dangerous. Our MCP returns each source's last-updated time. In this snapshot Upbit was fresh at 14:58 and CoinMarketCap at 14:49, but CoinGecko hit a rate limit (429) and failed, so its previous-day 21:30 data was flagged as stale. Rather than quietly serving an old value as if current, it shows you "this is stale." For automated trading and research, that transparency is the core of trust. The diagram below is each source's state.
How do you use it from an AI agent?#
The service is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, so an AI agent like Claude pulls live prices with a single tool call. Separate tools return one coin's detail, the kimchi premium, the top N by market cap, and the full list of 717 coins. The 24-hour change comes along too (BTC +1.01%, ETH +2.84% in this snapshot), a foundation for simple technical signals. So an agent can answer "what is the BTC kimchi premium right now?" instantly from cached multi-source data.
How can you verify it yourself?#
Open the same coin in the Upbit app and on CoinGecko at the same time and see whether our table's spread reproduces. You can recompute the kimchi premium by dividing the Upbit won price by the global-implied won price. For wiring up the MCP, see the official docs below.
Reference links
Note: the prices, premium, and freshness above are a single snapshot from 2026-06-30 14:58 UTC and markets move in real time. The figures are examples, not trading advice. Source availability (for example a 429) also changes, so verify actual values at call time.
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