Alien Probe who

alienprobe-who-mcp

An MCP server that gives any agent one legal-entity fact — LEI, legal name, jurisdiction, entity and registration status — for $0.05 USDC on Base, paid per call over x402. No signup, no API key, no account. The wallet is the account.

Two tools:

Tool	Cost	What it does
who_terms	free	Returns the advertised price, network, payee and coverage. Never pays. Works with no wallet.
who	$0.05, real money	Returns the entity record. Misses and ambiguities cost nothing.

Client config

Three lines. Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) or Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json):

{ "mcpServers": { "who": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@alienprobe/who-mcp"],
  "env": { "PRIVATE_KEY": "0x...", "MAX_USD_PER_SESSION": "1.00" } } } }

Drop the env block entirely and the server still starts — who_terms works, who refuses with wallet_not_configured. That is the safe way to try it.

Environment

Var	Default	Meaning
PRIVATE_KEY	(none)	A throwaway Base-mainnet wallet holding a little USDC. Optional. Never logged, echoed, or returned in a tool result.
MAX_USD_PER_CALL	0.10	Hard ceiling on one lookup. The lookup is advertised at $0.05.
MAX_USD_PER_SESSION	1.00	Hard ceiling on everything this server process spends before restart.

See .env.example. Never commit a real key. Fund a wallet that holds nothing else — about $1 of USDC covers 20 lookups. This repo does not tell you how to get USDC onto Base; see https://docs.base.org/base-chain/tools/bridges/.

Spend caps

The server preflights every who call with a plain, unwrapped fetch — no signer exists on that path — reads the advertised price out of the 402, and only then decides. If the price exceeds MAX_USD_PER_CALL, or would push the running total past MAX_USD_PER_SESSION, it refuses with a result the model can read and act on:

{
  "error": "spend_cap_exceeded",
  "scope": "per_session",
  "price_usd": 0.05,
  "cap_usd": 1.0,
  "spent_usd_this_session": 1.0,
  "remaining_usd": 0.0,
  "hint": "the session budget is spent; raise MAX_USD_PER_SESSION and restart the MCP server to buy more"
}

A session is one server process. Restarting the client resets the counter, so the per-session cap is a brake, not a ledger — the wallet balance is the real ceiling. Keep it small.

What comes back

A paid hit is the API's body verbatim plus paid_usd:

{
  "schema_version": "who-lookup.v1",
  "subject": { "type": "who", "value": "apple.com" },
  "answer": {
    "lei": "HWUPKR0MPOU8FGXBT394",
    "legal_name": "Apple Inc.",
    "jurisdiction": "US-CA",
    "entity_status": "ACTIVE",
    "registration_status": "ISSUED",
    "match": { "by": "domain", "rule": "domain_exact" },
    "official_website": "https://apple.com/"
  },
  "source": { "name": "...", "vintage": "...", "coverage": "..." },
  "paid_usd": 0.05
}

q is a company name, a registrable domain, or a 20-character LEI. To disambiguate a name, append a jurisdiction in the same string: "Acme Corp;US-DE".

paid_usd is the authorized price, not the receipt

paid_usd is the amount the server authorized — the price the API advertised in its 402 and that the spend caps were judged against. It is not read back from the chain.

One case where it overstates: a wallet's first successful lookup on this pricing shelf settles at $0 (first-can-free; a property of the service, not of this client). That call still reports "paid_usd": 0.05. Every subsequent call actually moves $0.05.

The server's session counter inherits the same overstatement, which is the safe direction — it stops you early, never late. If you need the truth, the on-chain USDC Transfer from your wallet is the only receipt. Do not use paid_usd for accounting.

Free refusals

These never pay, and they come back as ordinary tool results the model can reason about — not exceptions:

Upstream	Result
400	{"error":"invalid_subject","reason":"empty"}
404	{"error":"not_found","coverage":"..."}
409	{"error":"ambiguous","candidates":[...],"hint":"re-ask with the exact legal_name, then a ;jurisdiction suffix if it still collides"}
503	{"error":"source_unavailable"}

The API only charges once it can commit to one entity, so an ambiguous re-ask is still free while it stays ambiguous.

What this does not do

• No street addresses, no officers or directors, no ownership graph.
• No guessing. A miss is a 404, not a best-effort answer.
• Legal names that normalize to fewer than 2 Latin alphanumerics (CJK, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai) are absent from this data vintage entirely — every door, not just the name door.
• Domains match only where the source links an LEI to an official website, on the exact registrable domain. A subdomain misses.

Development

npm install
npm test     # 28 contract rows over a mocked fetch: no network, no wallet, no payment
npm run smoke  # spawns the server, drives initialize/tools/list/who_terms over real stdio

npm run smoke hits the live endpoint to fetch the 402. It runs with PRIVATE_KEY blank and asserts the advertised amount is "50000" ($0.05). It cannot pay.

src/core.mjs holds the transport-free logic and takes an injected fetch, which is why the tests never need a wallet. src/index.mjs is only the MCP wiring; @x402/* and viem are imported lazily, on a call already cleared to pay.

Built on @modelcontextprotocol/sdk 1.30.0. See SPEC.md for the full contract and the distribution plan.

License

MIT © Brent Bryson. See LICENSE.