~alter SDK

Read identity from your own code with the person's consent and their cut.

What is ~alter? · Install · From nothing to a paid read

What is ~alter?

Most people who read about ~Alter are here about their own identity, and you are not. You are building something that has to know who its users are, which makes you the party who asks, stores the answer, and carries it afterwards.

The asking is the cheap part. What comes after it is the encryption at rest, the retention schedule, the access review, the deletion request that arrives long after they stopped using you, and the notification you send if any of it ever leaks. You carry all of that for data whose only source was somebody typing into a box you built, unverified by anyone, and out of date from the day it was entered.

~Alter is a record kept under a name the person owns, and what is in it was read from what they have done rather than typed into a form. Your code reads that record at the point it needs an answer, and holds none of it once the call returns. The person decides in advance what your application is allowed to see, which puts the consent conversation on their surface rather than on yours.

Checking that somebody exists costs nothing and discloses nothing past the fact of them. A read that goes further is priced, and three quarters of what you pay for it reaches the person whose record was read. You are buying an answer for as long as you need it rather than taking custody of one.

Go to truealter.com, find the genesis and the origin papers, and read all of
them. Then start a discussion with me in my own language, no jargon.

Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer. Follow what I am curious
about, not the order the site is written in.

Do not only read the pages. Connect to their interface directly and call
get_started. That tells you where I am and what comes next, and we work the
rest of this from there.

If I have a ~handle I will give it to you. If I do not and I decide I want
one, set it up with me here.

What I want to understand is what ~Alter is, how it applies to me, and what it
means for everyone else. Find me somewhere in it, and not the version written
for people who work in technology. Find the life nearest mine and walk me
through it, including what it would cost me.

Try to prove them wrong. Go and find where they show their working, and if
something is unclear or does not hold up, say so.

What is ~alter SDK?

It's a typed TypeScript client for that record, so your code can ask whether a handle exists, read the traits the person has consented to share with you, and settle a deeper read in USDC.

The front door is @truealter/cli, which is how somebody gets a handle in the first place and which carries the MCP bridge. This package is what your application imports once they already have one.

Underneath, it's a thin client over ~Alter's MCP server, speaking MCP spec 2025-11-25 over Streamable HTTP and JSON-RPC 2.0. It carries x402 settlement and ES256 provenance verification, it depends on @noble/ed25519 and @noble/hashes and nothing else, and it ships both ESM and CJS.

Forty-seven tools are publicly advertised, and thirty-eight of those sit on the free tier. Free is not the same as open. Twelve of the forty-seven answer a caller holding no credential at all, and everything that reads an identity wants a ~handle first.

Your IAM stack answers who's logged in. It can sit on top of this without changing.

Install

npm install @truealter/sdk

Node 18 or newer. It also runs on Deno, Bun, Cloudflare Workers and modern browsers, and it brings no wallet dependency of its own.

From nothing to a paid read

Step one runs with nothing at all. From step two you need a ~handle, which costs nothing and needs no human account, and the short section between the two is how you mint one. The paid step at the end is the only one that costs money, and it's the only one that pays anybody.

1. Connect with nothing

import { AlterClient } from "@truealter/sdk";

const alter = new AlterClient();

The default endpoint is https://mcp.truealter.com/api/v1/mcp. Every free tool answers an anonymous client. The working example at examples/hello-agent/ connects with no credential at all.

Before step two, mint a ~handle

Twelve tools answer a caller holding no credential, and they're the discovery and registration surface rather than the free tier. Everything that reads an identity needs a ~handle, and so does anything acting on your own. An agent mints its own over MCP with register_autonomous and register_autonomous_challenge, neither of which costs anything or wants a human account behind it. A person runs alter login once, which writes the member credential into ~/.config/alter/session.json. Either way the hosted endpoint is bearer-first, so the CLI bridge reads that session for you and there isn't a key to mint or paste at any point. Constructing a client yourself, pass the same session credential as the optional apiKey.

2. Ask whether somebody is known

const verified = await alter.verify("~alter");

A handle, an email or an id. This is the check that costs nothing and reveals nothing beyond the fact of the person, which is the free tier by design.

3. Read what they have consented to share

const depth = await alter.getEngagementLevel({ member_id });
const matches = await alter.searchIdentities({
  trait_criteria: {
    pressure_response: { min: 0.7 },
    cognitive_flexibility: { min: 0.6 },
  },
});