Crypto data API

Perception exposes its intelligence layer through two access methods. The REST API at api.perception.to serves standard JSON responses over HTTP, you authenticate with a Bearer token, make GET or POST requests, and get back structured data. This is what you'd use to build dashboards, integrate into trading systems, power internal tools, or feed data into spreadsheets and notebooks.

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) server gives AI assistants direct access to the same data. When you connect Perception to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any MCP-compatible client, the AI can call 31 tools to search articles, pull sentiment data, compare entities, track narrative momentum, and query analyst ratings. The AI gets structured data back and can reason over it, combine multiple queries, and produce analysis that would take a human analyst hours.

Both protocols hit the same underlying data pipeline: 1,000+ sources, one sentiment model, one entity recognition system, one trend extractor. The difference is the access pattern: REST for deterministic programmatic integration, MCP for AI-native conversational workflows. Most teams end up using both, the API for production systems and MCP for ad-hoc research and analysis. The dashboard at app.perception.to is the visual surface over the same data, for daily monitoring and deep dives.

The core of the API is article search. Query 1.8M+ items from 1,000+ sources with filters for sentiment (positive, negative, neutral), outlet, language, region, date range, and entity. Results include the article title, source, publication date, sentiment score, and detected entities. On paid plans, you can pull full article text for deeper analysis.

Beyond search, the API gives you access to AI-extracted trends with signal strength and momentum scores, historical sentiment data broken down by outlet and time period, the Fear & Greed Index updated every 90 seconds, entity profiles with coverage stats and relationship maps, analyst consensus ratings and recent actions for 70+ tickers, and narrative momentum tracking that tells you whether a theme is accelerating or fading.

The Intelligence plan adds regulatory filing search filtered by agency and jurisdiction, scenario analysis using historical analogues (what happened to sentiment last time the SEC sued an exchange?), full entity intelligence profiles, and research save/recall for persistent analysis across sessions. MCP exposes all 31 tools; the REST API covers the highest-demand endpoints with more being added.

Authentication is straightforward: generate a personal API key from your Perception account settings, then pass it as a Bearer token in the Authorization header. The same key works for both the REST API and MCP connections. Keys are SHA-256 hashed at rest and can be revoked instantly from the dashboard.

Every response includes rate limit headers (X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset) so your integration can handle throttling gracefully. CORS is enabled for browser-based applications. Error responses use standard HTTP status codes with descriptive messages, no proprietary error formats to decode.

For MCP integration, we support one-click installation for Claude Desktop, VS Code, and Cursor. Copy a CLI command for Claude Code. The MCP server runs on Cloud Run with streamable HTTP transport, which means it works with any MCP-compatible client without additional infrastructure. Connect, authenticate, and start making tool calls in under a minute.

A free API key gives you 5 credits per day and the 14 core tools: article search, sentiment, trends, Fear & Greed, entity comparison, narrative momentum, and the daily radar. No credit card, enough to evaluate the product and run basic research queries. The dashboard starts with a 14-day free trial at full Intelligence access.