Identity Income

Where your identity earns. When someone queries your identity record, they pay for the answer, and with your consent your share of that payment accrues to you. You are not the product here: the readers are the ones who pay.

How earning works

Every paid read against your record is a single consented query. It returns the answer to one specific question, never your raw data, and your share accrues to your ledger the moment it runs. You set consent once. Every qualifying query after that pays you.

The payment rides the x402 payment protocol. That page covers the wire mechanics; this one covers what you earn and when.

Free reads and paid reads

Not every read against your record is a paid one. Each record carries a one-time free allowance, sized to your engagement level: higher tiers and deeper trust earn a larger allowance. A free read still earns you recognition, a settled $0 signal that counts toward how legible and queryable you are. It does not earn Identity Income.

Once the free allowance is spent, reads settle through x402 as paid queries. Only a paid query earns Identity Income, and only paid activity counts toward your paid-activity legibility. Recognition tells the network you are worth reading; income is what a paid read pays you.

Where a paid read goes

You keep 75% of every paid read, the largest share by design. The rest covers the network that made the read possible:

75%

The data subject: Your share of every paid read, with your consent.

15%

~alter network: Infrastructure, verification, and network operations.

5%

Facilitator: The agent or platform that brought the query: the community entry point.

5%

~alter Commons: The community treasury, held by ~alter as steward, funding shared infrastructure.

Worked through: a $1 query pays you 75¢.

Accrual and payout

You do not need a wallet to earn. Your share accrues to your ledger as a running balance from your first paid read. Payout is a separate, later choice: you settle when you want a destination, and the balance waits for you until then.

Accrual

Indicative at query time, server-authoritative at settlement. Every paid read writes to the audit ledger for earnings and dispute resolution.

Payout

Deferrable and non-custodial. The facilitator is a mock today: there is no live payout rail yet, so balances accrue and settlement goes live with the production rail.

Consent gates it

A query you have not consented to is rejected and never charged, so it earns nothing. Your engagement level sets what can be queried.

Earnings and transaction history

These endpoints report your accrued balance and the queries behind it.