Blockdaemon wanted to bring its financial APIs to AI assistants quickly, with security and observability in place from launch. Building and maintaining authentication, access controls, rate limits, and logging would have taken time away from its financial tools.
It chose the Zuplo MCP Gateway to handle those controls. Its engineers could focus on the MCP server’s tools while using Zuplo to manage access and see what happened on each call.
Those tools cover decentralized finance, or DeFi: financial services built on blockchain networks. They let agents compare prices for exchanging tokens, inspect lending positions, and check rewards earned by staking tokens to help secure a network.
In Blockdaemon’s announcement, Varun Gyanchandani, Director of Engineering, explains why those controls mattered:
Our customers adopt what they can audit, so agent access had to ship with authentication, curation, and logging enforced at the gateway from the first request.
How Blockdaemon uses Zuplo MCP Gateway
Blockdaemon’s DeFi MCP Server makes more than 180 financial tools available to AI assistants, including Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, and Codex. Agents can search for the tool they need, whether that’s checking a lending position or comparing token exchange prices.
The Zuplo MCP Gateway sits in front of that server:
Blockdaemon builds and maintains the financial tools. Requests from AI clients pass through Zuplo before reaching those tools, so Blockdaemon can apply access rules and record activity at the gateway.
That gives Blockdaemon four controls it needs to run the service:
- Authentication. Zuplo checks who is connecting before a request reaches Blockdaemon’s MCP server.
- Tool access. Blockdaemon chooses which tools to expose. It can offer different sets of tools without rebuilding the financial tools themselves.
- Audit logs. Structured tool-call logs give Blockdaemon a record of what was called and who called it. Zuplo’s Audit Logs can also store request events for review in the portal or through the API.
- Traffic controls. Rate limits help Blockdaemon control how often agents call its tools. The gateway also screens MCP traffic for prompt injection.
Less infrastructure to build and maintain
Putting these controls in the gateway lets Blockdaemon change access policies without rewriting its financial tools. When its engineers add a tool, they don’t have to build another authentication flow or logging system around it.
That leaves Blockdaemon’s engineers more time to develop financial tools for the more than 30 blockchain networks it supports. They can ship new tools with confidence that they can control access and review how agents use them. Zuplo MCP Gateway can sit in front of an MCP server on its own, with no API migration required.
Read the Blockdaemon customer story for more on its work with Zuplo. To see how to apply the same controls to your MCP server, start with the MCP Gateway documentation.