asic-lookup

asic-lookup-mcp

An MCP server that looks up Australian companies by ABN, ACN or company name against the ASIC Company Register — about 4 million companies.

It spends your money. USD 0.01 per successful lookup, paid automatically from a wallet you configure. A lookup that matches nothing is free, and so is a malformed one. There is no account and no API key: the payment is the credential, under the x402 protocol, in USDC on Base mainnet.

The server will not start until you have told it a total spend cap.

Install

Nothing to install. Point your MCP client at it with npx and it fetches on first run.

npx @nightshiftbuilds/asic-lookup-mcp is how it runs.

You need a Base mainnet wallet holding a little USDC. You do not need ETH: x402 exact payments are an off-chain EIP-3009 signature settled by a facilitator, so your wallet signs and pays no gas.

Claude Desktop

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json on Windows:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "asic-lookup": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@nightshiftbuilds/asic-lookup-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "SPEND_CAP_USD": "1.00",
        "PRIVATE_KEY_FILE": "/Users/you/.config/asic-lookup/key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Cursor

.cursor/mcp.json in a project, or ~/.cursor/mcp.json globally:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "asic-lookup": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@nightshiftbuilds/asic-lookup-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "SPEND_CAP_USD": "1.00",
        "PRIVATE_KEY_FILE": "/Users/you/.config/asic-lookup/key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add asic-lookup \
  --env SPEND_CAP_USD=1.00 \
  --env PRIVATE_KEY_FILE=$HOME/.config/asic-lookup/key \
  -- npx -y @nightshiftbuilds/asic-lookup-mcp

The key file

PRIVATE_KEY_FILE is preferred over PRIVATE_KEY because a client config file is not a good home for a wallet key — it gets synced, backed up and shared in screenshots.

mkdir -p ~/.config/asic-lookup
printf '0x%s' "$YOUR_KEY_WITHOUT_0X" > ~/.config/asic-lookup/key
chmod 600 ~/.config/asic-lookup/key

Configuration

Variable	Required	Default	What it does
SPEND_CAP_USD	yes	none	Total USD this server may spend before it refuses every further lookup. Roughly 100 lookups per dollar. There is deliberately no default.
PRIVATE_KEY_FILE	one of these two	—	Path to a file containing the wallet's private key.
PRIVATE_KEY	one of these two	—	The key itself, 0x + 64 hex characters.
MAX_PRICE_USD_PER_CALL	no	0.01	The most one lookup may cost. A 402 asking for more is refused, not paid.
REQUEST_TIMEOUT_MS	no	45000	How long to wait for the API, per network attempt. The paid retry gets its own budget rather than the leftovers of the unpaid one, so a paid lookup's worst case is roughly twice this. 1000–300000.
EXPECTED_PAY_TO	no	the endpoint's published payee	The only address this server will sign a transfer to. Change it only with API_BASE_URL, and only deliberately.
MAX_AUTHORISATION_SECONDS	no	600	The longest a signature this server produces may stay spendable. A 402 asking for more is refused. 30–3600.
API_BASE_URL	no	https://api.nightshiftbuilds.com	Override the endpoint. Must be https.

The cap is counted per server process. Restarting the server resets it, which is worth knowing if your client restarts servers often.

The tool

lookup_australian_company — give exactly one of:

Argument	Meaning
abn	Australian Business Number, 11 digits. Spaces and hyphens are ignored.
acn	Australian Company Number, 9 digits. Spaces and hyphens are ignored.
name	Company name, matched as a prefix, case insensitive.
limit	Maximum results for a name search, 1–25. Does not change the price.

They are alternative ways to identify one company, not filters that combine, so passing two is an error rather than a narrower search.

Returns, per match: registered name, ACN or ARBN, ABN, registration status, entity type and class, registration and deregistration dates, previous state of registration, state registration number, and former names. Plus what the lookup cost, the Base settlement transaction hash, and your running total against the cap.

What it does not have

Asking for these will not work, because the underlying dataset does not contain them:

• GST registration status, business address, state or postcode — those live in the Australian Business Register extract, a different dataset
• directors, officeholders or shareholders
• trading names, financial data
• anything about a sole trader or partnership that is not a registered company

It is also a weekly snapshot, not the official register. ASIC Connect is authoritative for anything that matters legally.

How the money works

Every lookup is one HTTP request that comes back 402 Payment Required with a price, a payee and a token. The server signs an EIP-3009 authorisation for exactly that amount and retries. A facilitator settles it on Base and the answer comes back with the transaction hash.

Five separate limits sit in front of your signing key:

1. Only Base mainnet. No scheme client is registered for any other chain, so a 402 naming one has nothing that could sign it.
2. Only USDC, only the exact scheme, only an EIP-3009 transfer, and only up to MAX_PRICE_USD_PER_CALL — checked against what the endpoint actually asked for, not against what it asked for last time. A 402 is free to demand any number it likes; the number inside the signature is the one that leaves your wallet, so that is the number that gets checked. A 402 that tries to steer the signature onto Permit2 or an escrow flow is refused rather than signed.
3. Only EXPECTED_PAY_TO. The payee is pinned, not merely checked for being a well-formed address, so a hijacked endpoint cannot redirect your payments to itself within the ceiling.
4. Only for MAX_AUTHORISATION_SECONDS. A signature is spendable until its validBefore, and the 402 names that. Unbounded, a 402 can obtain an authorisation valid for centuries; here anything over ten minutes is refused.
5. SPEND_CAP_USD in total, counted against signatures rather than settlements. The reservation is taken before the request is sent, so concurrent lookups cannot collectively overrun it.

On the accounting. What leaves a wallet is a signature, not a settlement, so that is what the cap counts. A 404 costs nothing — but the authorisation it signed is still in the payee's hands and still settleable, so the amount stays held against the cap until its validBefore passes, and the spend line says so. Ten thousand "free" misses cannot hand out more live authorisations than your cap. Anything that ends after a signature exists — a timeout, a dropped body, a 409, a 503 of unknown outcome — is charged, not released, because a signature in someone else's hands is not a refund. After one of those, the identical query is refused until the authorisation expires: retrying it would sign a second one.

Nothing is broadcast from your machine, and the key is never logged, never returned in a tool result and never included in an error message.

Data licence and attribution

The data this server returns contains ASIC Company Register data sourced from data.gov.au, © Australian Securities and Investments Commission, licensed under CC BY 3.0 AU.

That attribution is a condition of the licence, not decoration. It ships in every tool result so it travels with the data. Keep it if you redistribute what you get back.

The full dataset is free to download from data.gov.au. This is a lookup service, not a way to obtain the dataset, and there is no cheaper path to a bulk copy through it.

Development

npm install
npm test          # 139 tests: no wallet needed, no money spent
npm run build

The suite mocks the 402 handshake with a challenge recorded from the live endpoint and asserts what actually gets signed — the amount, the payee, the token, the chain, the authorisation lifetime, and that the signature recovers to the configured wallet. Both wire versions are exercised end to end. The accounting tests run against a fetch that really signs, so they can tell "nothing was charged" from "nothing was signed"; every spend-safety fix has a test that fails when the fix is reverted. One test hits the real API unpaid to read its published price, which is free by design; set SKIP_LIVE_TESTS=1 to skip it offline.

Links

• API: https://api.nightshiftbuilds.com (OpenAPI, agent orientation, terms)
• Runnable Python and TypeScript clients for the same API: asic-lookup-api-docs
• x402: https://x402.org

MIT licensed. See LICENSE.