Cardano Unified MCP Server

An independent, community-maintained Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI assistants deep knowledge of the Cardano ecosystem — documentation, SDKs, smart contract languages, governance, scaling, and developer standards, all searchable from a single endpoint.

Run by Easy1Staking. Hosted instance: mcp.easy1staking.com

New here? MCP is an open standard that lets an AI assistant plug into external knowledge servers. Connect this one and your assistant can answer Cardano development questions with citations to real upstream docs instead of making things up.

Read ABOUT.md for the full story — what this project is, where the knowledge comes from, how it is vetted, and who maintains it. Read docs/architecture.md for the component, query, and ingestion diagrams.

What's Inside

50+ documentation sources across 8 categories, sourced from the cardano-dev-skills curated registry:

• Infrastructure — Ogmios, Kupo, Blockfrost, Mithril, Oura, Pallas, Dolos, Yaci Store, Koios, Cardano GraphQL, Cardano Wallet, Cardano Node Wiki, DB-Sync, Cardano CLI, Amaru
• Smart Contracts — Aiken (lang + stdlib + examples + design patterns), Plutus, OpShin, Plutarch, Plu-ts, Scalus, Pebble, Helios, CIP-113 Programmable Tokens (core + platform), Smart Contract Vulnerabilities, Cardano Use Case Templates
• SDKs — Mesh SDK, Evolution SDK, cardano-js-sdk, PyCardano, cardano-client-lib, Cardano Serialization Lib, Buildooor, Cardano Connect with Wallet, Cardano Addresses, CIP-113 SDK
• Standards — CIPs (170+), Developer Portal, Cardano Docs, Cardano Ledger
• Governance — GovTool, SanchoNet
• Scaling — Hydra, Ouroboros Leios
• Oracles — Charli3 (Pull Oracle Contracts/Client/SDK)
• Testing — Yaci DevKit, Cardano Node Antithesis

The authoritative source list lives in cardano-dev-skills/registry/sources.yaml. To add or remove a source, open a PR there.

Features

MCP Tools

• search_docs — Hybrid semantic + keyword search across all indexed documentation
• get_doc — Retrieve full content of a specific document
• list_topics — Browse available sources and their topics
• list_skills — List the workflow skills exposed by this server
• get_skill — Retrieve the full SKILL.md for a named workflow

MCP Resources

• cardano://sources — Overview of all indexed sources
• cardano://source/{name} — Topic listing for a specific source
• cardano://doc/{source}/{path} — Full document content

MCP Prompts

All 15 cardano-dev-skills workflows are exposed as MCP prompts. Each takes an optional request argument with the user's specific context, then dispatches the skill's workflow (which uses search_docs for citations).

build-transaction · cardano-context · connect-wallet · debug-transaction · design-token · explain-cip · explain-eutxo · governance-guide · optimize-validator · query-chain · review-contract · scaffold-project · setup-devnet · suggest-tooling · write-validator

Quick Start

Use the hosted instance

Add to your MCP client configuration (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cardano": {
      "url": "https://mcp.easy1staking.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Run locally (stdio)

# Clone both repos as siblings — this server depends on cardano-dev-skills.
git clone https://github.com/easy1staking-com/cardano-dev-skills.git
git clone https://github.com/easy1staking-com/cardano-unified-mcp-server.git
cd cardano-unified-mcp-server

npm install
npm run build

# Ingest documentation (requires EMBEDDINGS_API_KEY for semantic search)
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your OpenAI API key
npm run ingest

# Run in stdio mode
node dist/index.js --stdio

Add to your MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cardano": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/cardano-unified-mcp-server/dist/index.js", "--stdio"]
    }
  }
}

Run as HTTP server

# Start the server (default port 3000)
npm start

# Or with API key protection
MCP_API_KEY=your-secret npm start

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
PORT	3000	HTTP server port
HOST	0.0.0.0	Bind address
SKILLS_PATH	../cardano-dev-skills	Path to the cardano-dev-skills checkout (registry + vendored docs + skill workflows)
EMBEDDINGS_API_KEY	—	OpenAI API key for semantic search
EMBEDDINGS_API_BASE	https://api.openai.com/v1	OpenAI-compatible endpoint
EMBEDDINGS_MODEL	text-embedding-3-large	Embedding model
MCP_API_KEY	—	Optional Bearer token for HTTP mode
DB_PATH	./data/docs.db	SQLite database path

Architecture

graph TB
    subgraph clients["MCP clients"]
        CD["Claude Desktop · Claude Code · Cursor · Windsurf · …"]
    end

    subgraph skills["cardano-dev-skills (sibling repo)"]
        REG["registry/sources.yaml"]
        VEND["docs/sources/<slug>/<br/>vendored markdown"]
        SK["skills/*/SKILL.md<br/>workflow guides"]
    end

    subgraph server["Cardano Unified MCP Server"]
        T["Tools (search_docs, get_skill, …)"]
        R["Resources"]
        P["Prompts (auto-loaded from skills)"]
        DB[("VectorDB<br/>SQLite + FTS5 + sqlite-vec")]
        T --> DB
        R --> DB
    end

    REG --> server
    VEND --> DB
    SK --> P
    SK --> T

    clients -->|"stdio or HTTP + SSE"| server

Full component, query, and ingestion diagrams in docs/architecture.md.

Search modes

• Hybrid (default) — BM25 full-text (40%) + vector similarity (60%)
• Semantic — Embedding cosine similarity only
• Keyword — Full-text search with Porter stemming (no API key needed)

Kubernetes Deployment

The server is designed for stateless horizontal scaling on Kubernetes:

# Apply manifests
kubectl apply -f k8s/deployment.yaml
kubectl apply -f k8s/cronjob-ingest.yaml

# Create secrets
kubectl create secret generic cardano-mcp-secrets \
  --from-literal=EMBEDDINGS_API_KEY=sk-... \
  --from-literal=MCP_API_KEY=your-secret

• 2 replicas with health checks
• Persistent volume for the SQLite database
• Weekly CronJob for documentation re-ingestion (clones cardano-dev-skills HEAD first, then runs ingest)

Ingestion

# Ingest all sources from skills' registry
npm run ingest

# Ingest a specific source (name substring match)
npm run ingest -- Aiken

# Dry-run: read and validate files, but skip chunking and embeddings
npm run ingest -- --validate-only

# Skip embeddings (keyword-only mode, no API key needed)
npm run ingest -- --skip-embeddings

# Check that every registry entry resolves to a vendored dir
npm run validate:skills

The Skills Drift GitHub Action runs the contract check nightly against cardano-dev-skills HEAD — a red badge means the upstream registry has drifted in a way that would break Sunday's indexer.

Development

npm run dev          # Watch mode with hot reload
npm run typecheck    # Type checking only
npm run build        # Compile TypeScript

License

Apache-2.0

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for community standards. Note: new doc sources are added in cardano-dev-skills, not here.