Two engineers at Revolut's crypto exchange built a fully functional market-making system in about half an hour. Not a prototype. Not a carefully prepared demo. Just a first idea, executed using Anthropic's Claude AI connected to the Revolut X trading API through a protocol called MCP.
The experiment is raising a question the retail trading industry may not be ready to answer: if an AI agent can orchestrate an entire trading workflow through a simple text prompt, what exactly is a broker's platform worth anymore?
Revolut’s Side Project That Broke the Product Roadmap
Nikita Ivanov and Vlad Kaminski, engineers on Revolut's crypto team, built the integration as a personal experiment, according to Leonid Bashlykov, Revolut's Head of Product for Crypto.
"Two A-players on my team...were playing with Claude automations and built the MCP as a side project, just for fun," Bashlykov wrote on LinkedIn. "Then we saw what it could actually do. And it broke our product roadmap thinking."
Bashlykov said he personally built a working market-making strategy using Claude, MCP, and the Revolut X API in 30 minutes, with no advance preparation. The workflow covered everything from portfolio screening and position sizing to execution, monitoring and automated alerts. We are talking about tasks that traditionally require separate tools, scripts, and a fair amount of technical expertise to connect together.
MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard developed by Anthropic that allows AI models to discover and use external tools through a standardized interface. Rather than requiring custom-built integrations for every API, MCP lets an AI agent connect to any compatible system and reason across all of them simultaneously. Revolut X is currently offering MCP access in beta.
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Prompts Replace Dashboards
The practical implication, according to Bashlykov, is that complex trading strategies no longer require coding knowledge or platform fluency. "Rebalance to 60/40 BTC/ETH if BTC dominance drops below 52%," he wrote as an example. "That's now a prompt."
Fintech analyst Linas Beliūnas, who covered the story in his Weekly Fintech Pulse newsletter, framed it as a potential architectural shift. "The agent reads portfolio data, checks conditions, pulls context - then decides," he wrote, contrasting MCP-connected agents with rule-based trading bots that simply execute predefined instructions.
Beliūnas noted that the workflow Bashlykov described, handling inventory management, dynamic quoting, position sizing, execution, monitoring and Telegram alerts, "normally requires a quant, a developer, backtesting infrastructure, and weeks of iteration."
Most AI trading tools currently on the market, both Bashlykov and Beliūnas agree, are still limited to price alerts, simple queries, and basic automations.
What makes MCP different, the company claims, is composability. A single connected workflow can simultaneously execute trades, read news, track on-chain data flows and update dashboards. Revolut X functions as the execution layer; Claude functions as the interface.
The Brokers Already Moving (and Those Who Aren't)
Revolut is not entirely alone. CFD broker ATFX partnered with data firm KX late last year to deploy an AI-driven MCP server for real-time trading data, and LSEG connected its market data feeds directly to ChatGPT in December 2025, allowing institutional users to pull live information on demand. A FinanceMagnates.com analysis from November 2025 noted that crypto-native firms were already moving into AI's data layer while asking whether traditional brokers would follow.
The answer, so far, is: slowly. Firms like XTB, IG Group and Plus500 have spent years and significant capital building proprietary trading interfaces. XTB entered 2026 projecting $186 million in income while doubling down on platform growth and client acquisition, a roadmap built around the assumption that the interface is the product.
That assumption is now being tested. A comparison of client metrics across IG, CMC, Plus500 and XTB published last August showed that client numbers are growing across the board, but revenue per user varies dramatically. It signals that platform stickiness, not just user count, drives broker economics. If an AI agent can replicate a platform's functionality through a plain-language prompt, the stickiness argument weakens considerably.
Revolut's Head Start
Revolut's position in this shift is not accidental. The company has systematically built API-first infrastructure across asset classes. A partnership with CMC Markets Connect in 2024 brought CFD trading capabilities into its ecosystem through an API arrangement. A similar deal with GTN added bond trading for EEA customers the same year.
Revolut X itself launched with ambitions targeting a $200 billion European crypto market, with Bashlykov cited at the time as the driving force behind its expansion.
That API-first architecture is precisely what made the MCP experiment possible. A broker whose trading infrastructure lives inside a proprietary platform, rather than exposed through clean APIs, cannot simply plug in Claude and tell it to start market-making.
A Different Kind of Product Roadmap
"The question is to which point it continues to make sense bringing UI updates to the product if AI enabled flow allows so much more capabilities,” Bashlykov's concluded.
Retail brokers have spent years competing on better charts, faster buttons, and cleaner mobile apps. But a 30-minute session on Revolut suggests that race may already be running in the wrong direction.
The firms that built their platforms for screens are now watching rivals who built for APIs pull further ahead. And the gap is starting to show.
