# Quickstart

> Connect a client, authenticate, and take one idea through the full gauntlet.

## 1. Get a key

Sign up at [quantbase.live/start](/start/). The free tier is 200 trials a
month, a 10-asset universe and one holdout evaluation, and takes no card.

You will pass through a $0 checkout. Free and paid signup deliberately share
one path — the same customer record, webhook and key mint — rather than having
a second, less-tested flow beside the one that handles money.

Your key is shown **once**. Only its SHA-256 is stored, so a database dump of
this server is not a set of working credentials. The same property means a
lost key cannot be recovered, only replaced.

### One tenant per mailbox

Signing up again with the same address returns the **same tenant**, with the
same handle and the same trial count. Address spellings that reach one mailbox
are treated as one identity: `you+quant@gmail.com`, `y.o.u@gmail.com` and
`you@googlemail.com` are the same person here.

This is not an anti-fraud afterthought, it is the product. A fresh tenant is a
fresh N, and if N could be reset on demand then every deflated Sharpe, PBO and
minimum-backtest-length this server computes would be a number you could
choose. It also means signing up again is the supported way to replace a key
you lost, and it costs you nothing.

## 2. Connect a client

The endpoint is `https://mcp.quantbase.live/mcp`, streamable HTTP, TLS.
Authentication is a bearer token.

### Claude Code

```bash
claude mcp add --transport http quant-research \
  https://mcp.quantbase.live/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $QUANT_KEY"
```

### Claude Desktop / any `mcpServers` config

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "quant-research": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.quantbase.live/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}
```

### Cursor — `.cursor/mcp.json`

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "quant-research": {
      "url": "https://mcp.quantbase.live/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}
```

### Raw HTTP

```bash
curl -sS https://mcp.quantbase.live/mcp \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $QUANT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}'
```

> Transport is stateless HTTP, so a redeploy will not kill your connection.
> The corollary is that a connected client cannot be told about **new** tools —
> reconnect to refresh the tool list.

## 3. Orient

```
server_status()
```

Call this first in any new session. It reports what the server holds, what
changed recently, and which research lines are already closed. It is cheaper
than rediscovering that by trial and error.

## 4. Check whether the idea can survive its own costs

```
cost_model_refresh()
cost_breakeven(trades_per_day=20)
```

Do this **before** ingesting data. At the Coinbase entry tier — 60 bps taker
per side, non-promotional, so a 120 bps round trip — twenty trades a day is
an 8,760% annual cost drag (`120 × 20 × 365 / 100`). Most intraday ideas die
here, and they die in one tool call rather than a week.

## 5. Ingest, then check what you got

Coinbase spot is built in, and 22 liquid USD pairs are pre-registered:

```
data_ingest_universe(universe="coinbase-liquid-22", timeframe="1h")
job_status(job_id=...)
data_quality_report(...)
```

### Any other venue

Point `data_ingest` at an OHLCV CSV over https and label it with the venue it
came from:

```
data_ingest(
  symbol="BTCUSDT", timeframe="1d",
  start="2024-01-01", end="2026-01-01",
  source="url", venue="binance",
  url="https://example.com/Binance_BTCUSDT_d.csv",
)
```

`venue` is a label on the data, not an API this server calls. Common column
spellings are normalised, so an exchange export, a vendor file or your own
bucket all work as-is.

This server is reached over MCP, which means the client calling it is already
an integration layer — your agent can fetch from wherever it has access and
hand over the location. That is why there is no list of supported exchanges to
wait on.

Two limits worth knowing: the URL must be **public https** — the server refuses
private, loopback and cloud-metadata addresses, and re-checks on every redirect
— and the download is capped at 64 MB.

The built-in cost model is Coinbase's published ladder. It does not describe
Binance, and the server will not pretend it does: a cost model always names the
venue it came from. See [Costs](/docs/concepts/costs/).

Heavy work is asynchronous. A submit returns a `job_id`; poll `job_status`.

## 6. Register a split — once

```
split_register(train=..., test=..., holdout=...)
```

Ranges are immutable. The holdout is unreadable until you freeze a strategy.
A split also freezes the data-gap policy in force when it was registered, so
a later policy change cannot retroactively alter what your backtest saw.

It also records a digest of the bars inside its own range, re-checked before
every run. Appending newer bars is fine; revising history the split already
covers is refused. That matters most when the data came from a URL you chose
rather than from the built-in venue.

## 7. Register a strategy and test it across a universe

```
strategy_register(family="my-idea", spec={...})
feature_validate(...)
backtest_cross_section(universe="coinbase-liquid-22", ...)
```

Prefer `backtest_cross_section` over `backtest_submit`. One specification
across many assets counts as **one trial** — the spec is the hypothesis and
the assets are the sample. Testing the same idea on ten assets one at a time
costs you ten trials and tells you less.

## 8. Find out whether the result means anything

```
stats_deflated_sharpe(...)      # against the ledger's N, not yours
stats_pbo(...)                  # did selection help, or hurt?
stats_bootstrap_ci(...)         # does the interval straddle zero?
stats_min_backtest_length(...)  # do you even have enough history?
```

## 9. Gate, freeze, and spend the holdout

```
gate_check(...)
strategy_freeze(...)
holdout_evaluate(...)
```

One holdout attempt per strategy, ever. `gate_check` will tell you whether
you are ready before you spend it.

## Next

- [A complete worked session](/docs/workflow)
- [The trial ledger](/docs/concepts/ledger)
- [Tool reference](/docs/tools)