How to integrate Coinmarketcap MCP with OpenAI Agents SDK

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Introduction

This guide walks you through connecting Coinmarketcap to the OpenAI Agents SDK using the Composio tool router. By the end, you'll have a working Coinmarketcap agent that can show top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, fetch latest bitcoin and ethereum prices, list all exchanges with highest daily volume, get historical listings for binance on 2023-01-01 through natural language commands.

This guide will help you understand how to give your OpenAI Agents SDK agent real control over a Coinmarketcap account through Composio's Coinmarketcap MCP server.

Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at the key ideas and tools involved.

TL;DR

Here's what you'll learn:
  • Get and set up your OpenAI and Composio API keys
  • Install the necessary dependencies
  • Initialize Composio and create a Tool Router session for Coinmarketcap
  • Configure an AI agent that can use Coinmarketcap as a tool
  • Run a live chat session where you can ask the agent to perform Coinmarketcap operations

What is open-ai-agents-sdk?

The OpenAI Agents SDK is a lightweight framework for building AI agents that can use tools and maintain conversation state. It provides a simple interface for creating agents with hosted MCP tool support.

Key features include:

  • Hosted MCP Tools: Connect to external services through hosted MCP endpoints
  • SQLite Sessions: Persist conversation history across interactions
  • Simple API: Clean interface with Agent, Runner, and tool configuration
  • Streaming Support: Real-time response streaming for interactive applications

What is the Coinmarketcap MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Coinmarketcap MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your Coinmarketcap account. It provides structured and secure access to live and historical cryptocurrency market data, so your agent can perform actions like fetching crypto prices, mapping coins and exchanges, analyzing global trends, and retrieving detailed asset info on your behalf.

  • Real-time cryptocurrency price tracking: Instantly get the latest market quotes for any supported cryptocurrency, including price, volume, and market cap.
  • Comprehensive asset and exchange mapping: Retrieve and reference unique IDs, symbols, and names for all cryptocurrencies and exchanges to power portfolio and trading automations.
  • Historical listings and data analysis: Access historical exchange listings and past market snapshots to inform investment research or backtesting strategies.
  • Global market metrics aggregation: Let your agent pull up-to-date, aggregated market data like total market cap, trading volume, and dominance statistics for macro analysis.
  • Detailed asset and exchange metadata retrieval: Fetch rich metadata, including logos, descriptions, launch dates, and official links for any crypto asset or exchange—perfect for building dashboards or research tools.

Supported Tools & Triggers

Tools
Exchange Listings HistoricalTool to retrieve historical exchange listings for a specified date.
Cryptocurrency Listings LatestTool to fetch the latest active cryptocurrency listings with their current market data.
Cryptocurrency MapTool to retrieve a mapping of all cryptocurrencies, including their unique IDs, symbols, and names.
Get Latest Cryptocurrency QuotesTool to get the latest market quotes for one or more cryptocurrencies.
Exchange MapTool to retrieve a mapping of all cryptocurrency exchanges.
Get cryptocurrency infoTool to fetch metadata (description, logo, URLs) for one or more cryptocurrencies.
Get exchange infoTool to get detailed metadata for one or more exchanges.
Get API Key InfoTool to retrieve your CoinMarketCap API key details, rate limits, and usage statistics.
Global Metrics Quotes LatestTool to obtain the latest global cryptocurrency market metrics (market cap, volume, dominance).
Partner MapTool to retrieve a mapping of all CoinMarketCap partners with their unique IDs, names, and slugs.
Price ConversionTool to convert an amount from one cryptocurrency or fiat currency into another.

What is the Composio tool router, and how does it fit here?

What is Tool Router?

Composio's Tool Router helps agents find the right tools for a task at runtime. You can plug in multiple toolkits (like Gmail, HubSpot, and GitHub), and the agent will identify the relevant app and action to complete multi-step workflows. This can reduce token usage and improve the reliability of tool calls. Read more here: Getting started with Tool Router

The tool router generates a secure MCP URL that your agents can access to perform actions.

How the Tool Router works

The Tool Router follows a three-phase workflow:

  1. Discovery: Searches for tools matching your task and returns relevant toolkits with their details.
  2. Authentication: Checks for active connections. If missing, creates an auth config and returns a connection URL via Auth Link.
  3. Execution: Executes the action using the authenticated connection.

Step-by-step Guide

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:
  • Composio API Key and OpenAI API Key
  • Primary know-how of OpenAI Agents SDK
  • A live Coinmarketcap project
  • Some knowledge of Python or Typescript

Getting API Keys for OpenAI and Composio

OpenAI API Key
  • Go to the OpenAI dashboard and create an API key. You'll need credits to use the models, or you can connect to another model provider.
  • Keep the API key safe.
Composio API Key

Install dependencies

pip install composio_openai_agents openai-agents python-dotenv

Install the Composio SDK and the OpenAI Agents SDK.

Set up environment variables

bash
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...your-api-key
COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your-api-key
USER_ID=composio_user@gmail.com

Create a .env file and add your OpenAI and Composio API keys.

Import dependencies

import asyncio
import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv

from composio import Composio
from composio_openai_agents import OpenAIAgentsProvider
from agents import Agent, Runner, HostedMCPTool, SQLiteSession
What's happening:
  • You're importing all necessary libraries.
  • The Composio and OpenAIAgentsProvider classes are imported to connect your OpenAI agent to Composio tools like Coinmarketcap.

Set up the Composio instance

load_dotenv()

api_key = os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY")
user_id = os.getenv("USER_ID")

if not api_key:
    raise RuntimeError("COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set. Create a .env file with COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your_key")

# Initialize Composio
composio = Composio(api_key=api_key, provider=OpenAIAgentsProvider())
What's happening:
  • load_dotenv() loads your .env file so OPENAI_API_KEY and COMPOSIO_API_KEY are available as environment variables.
  • Creating a Composio instance using the API Key and OpenAIAgentsProvider class.

Create a Tool Router session

# Create a Coinmarketcap Tool Router session
session = composio.create(
    user_id=user_id,
    toolkits=["coinmarketcap"]
)

mcp_url = session.mcp.url

What is happening:

  • You give the Tool Router the user id and the toolkits you want available. Here, it is only coinmarketcap.
  • The router checks the user's Coinmarketcap connection and prepares the MCP endpoint.
  • The returned session.mcp.url is the MCP URL that your agent will use to access Coinmarketcap.
  • This approach keeps things lightweight and lets the agent request Coinmarketcap tools only when needed during the conversation.

Configure the agent

# Configure agent with MCP tool
agent = Agent(
    name="Assistant",
    model="gpt-5",
    instructions=(
        "You are a helpful assistant that can access Coinmarketcap. "
        "Help users perform Coinmarketcap operations through natural language."
    ),
    tools=[
        HostedMCPTool(
            tool_config={
                "type": "mcp",
                "server_label": "tool_router",
                "server_url": mcp_url,
                "headers": {"x-api-key": api_key},
                "require_approval": "never",
            }
        )
    ],
)
What's happening:
  • We're creating an Agent instance with a name, model (gpt-5), and clear instructions about its purpose.
  • The agent's instructions tell it that it can access Coinmarketcap and help with queries, inserts, updates, authentication, and fetching database information.
  • The tools array includes a HostedMCPTool that connects to the MCP server URL we created earlier.
  • The headers dict includes the Composio API key for secure authentication with the MCP server.
  • require_approval: 'never' means the agent can execute Coinmarketcap operations without asking for permission each time, making interactions smoother.

Start chat loop and handle conversation

print("\nComposio Tool Router session created.")

chat_session = SQLiteSession("conversation_openai_toolrouter")

print("\nChat started. Type your requests below.")
print("Commands: 'exit', 'quit', or 'q' to end\n")

async def main():
    try:
        result = await Runner.run(
            agent,
            "What can you help me with?",
            session=chat_session
        )
        print(f"Assistant: {result.final_output}\n")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}\n")

    while True:
        user_input = input("You: ").strip()
        if user_input.lower() in {"exit", "quit", "q"}:
            print("Goodbye!")
            break

        result = await Runner.run(
            agent,
            user_input,
            session=chat_session
        )
        print(f"Assistant: {result.final_output}\n")

asyncio.run(main())
What's happening:
  • The program prints a session URL that you visit to authorize Coinmarketcap.
  • After authorization, the chat begins.
  • Each message you type is processed by the agent using Runner.run().
  • The responses are printed to the console, and conversations are saved locally using SQLite.
  • Typing exit, quit, or q cleanly ends the chat.

Complete Code

Here's the complete code to get you started with Coinmarketcap and open-ai-agents-sdk:

import asyncio
import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv

from composio import Composio
from composio_openai_agents import OpenAIAgentsProvider
from agents import Agent, Runner, HostedMCPTool, SQLiteSession

load_dotenv()

api_key = os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY")
user_id = os.getenv("USER_ID")

if not api_key:
    raise RuntimeError("COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set. Create a .env file with COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your_key")

# Initialize Composio
composio = Composio(api_key=api_key, provider=OpenAIAgentsProvider())

# Create Tool Router session
session = composio.create(
    user_id=user_id,
    toolkits=["coinmarketcap"]
)
mcp_url = session.mcp.url

# Configure agent with MCP tool
agent = Agent(
    name="Assistant",
    model="gpt-5",
    instructions=(
        "You are a helpful assistant that can access Coinmarketcap. "
        "Help users perform Coinmarketcap operations through natural language."
    ),
    tools=[
        HostedMCPTool(
            tool_config={
                "type": "mcp",
                "server_label": "tool_router",
                "server_url": mcp_url,
                "headers": {"x-api-key": api_key},
                "require_approval": "never",
            }
        )
    ],
)

print("\nComposio Tool Router session created.")

chat_session = SQLiteSession("conversation_openai_toolrouter")

print("\nChat started. Type your requests below.")
print("Commands: 'exit', 'quit', or 'q' to end\n")

async def main():
    try:
        result = await Runner.run(
            agent,
            "What can you help me with?",
            session=chat_session
        )
        print(f"Assistant: {result.final_output}\n")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}\n")

    while True:
        user_input = input("You: ").strip()
        if user_input.lower() in {"exit", "quit", "q"}:
            print("Goodbye!")
            break

        result = await Runner.run(
            agent,
            user_input,
            session=chat_session
        )
        print(f"Assistant: {result.final_output}\n")

asyncio.run(main())

Conclusion

This was a starter code for integrating Coinmarketcap MCP with OpenAI Agents SDK to build a functional AI agent that can interact with Coinmarketcap.

Key features:

  • Hosted MCP tool integration through Composio's Tool Router
  • SQLite session persistence for conversation history
  • Simple async chat loop for interactive testing
You can extend this by adding more toolkits, implementing custom business logic, or building a web interface around the agent.

How to build Coinmarketcap MCP Agent with another framework

FAQ

What are the differences in Tool Router MCP and Coinmarketcap MCP?

With a standalone Coinmarketcap MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Coinmarketcap tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Coinmarketcap and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Can I use Tool Router MCP with OpenAI Agents SDK?

Yes, you can. OpenAI Agents SDK fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Coinmarketcap tools.

Can I manage the permissions and scopes for Coinmarketcap while using Tool Router?

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Coinmarketcap scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

How safe is my data with Composio Tool Router?

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Coinmarketcap data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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ASU
Letta
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HubSpot
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Altera
DataStax
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Context
ASU
Letta
glean
HubSpot
Agent.ai
Altera
DataStax
Entelligence
Rolai

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