Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents MCP Server

by vigilnotary Your server? Claim it

answering

Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents is answering right now. Last checked 1 min ago. It exposes 26 tools.

Agent leases, signed receipts, watchdogs, and optional paid source-verification evidence.

Uptime history 5 days of history

5 days agonow

100.0%

Uptime 24h

93 of 93 checks

Tools

read from the server

85 ms

Response time

average over 24h

open, no key

Access

streamable-http

What changed 1

Every tool that appeared, vanished or quietly changed what it asks for. Recorded since 6 September 2026. No other catalogue keeps this.

6 Sep a tool description was rewritten vigil_revoke_lease

Nothing serious here today

Today is the operative word: we check Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents every 15 minutes and re-read its code on every release. Watch it and you find out the day that stops being true.

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 1 min ago.

Claude Code Claude Desktop Codex Cursor VS Code

run in your terminal

claude mcp add vigil --transport http https://vigilnotary.com/mcp

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vigil": {
      "url": "https://vigilnotary.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

~/.codex/config.toml

[mcp_servers.vigil]
url = "https://vigilnotary.com/mcp"

.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vigil": {
      "url": "https://vigilnotary.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

.vscode/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vigil": {
      "url": "https://vigilnotary.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 26

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

vigil

vigil_anchor

PRO: anchor the current chain head to OpenTimestamps on demand (the chain is auto-anchored every few hours regardless).

vigil_anchors

Public timestamp submissions to OpenTimestamps calendars. A submission is pending, not an independently verified Bitcoin confirmation. No key required.

vigil_chain

Read a range of receipts to audit chain continuity. Max 1000 per call.

vigil_delete_watchdog

Remove a watchdog.

vigil_get_receipt

Fetch a receipt by serial number. Public — anyone can read any receipt.

vigil_grant_lease

Grant a short-lived, Ed25519-signed LEASE authorizing an agent to perform an action until it expires. A customer-run gateway verifies the lease offline (fail-closed) before letting the action through. This is the guard on a money/data-moving action. Free tier: 1 active lease (guarded agent).

vigil_heartbeat

'Still alive.' Reset a watchdog's timer. Call this at least once per interval.

vigil_info

Service description, the Ed25519 signing pubkey to verify receipts against, current chain head, and free-tier limits. No key required.

vigil_journal_delete

Delete a journal slot.

vigil_journal_get

Fetch a journal blob by slug. Returns base64 (decrypt client-side).

vigil_journal_list

List your journal slots (slug, size, last-updated).

vigil_journal_put

Store an opaque blob under a slug (overwrites). Encrypt client-side: the server stores exactly the bytes supplied and cannot enforce client encryption. Send bytes as base64. Free tier: 4 slots, 64KB each.

vigil_lease_status

Public status of a lease (active / expired / revoked). What a gateway polls for revocation. No key required.

vigil_leases

List your leases and their states.

vigil_notarize

Notarize work: POST the sha256 (64 hex chars) of anything and get back an Ed25519-signed, timestamped, hash-chained, serial-numbered receipt. The proof of 'when' is the position in the public chain, not the timestamp string. Free tier: 10/day.

vigil_pricing

The plans and per-tier limits (free, dev, pro). No key required.

vigil_register

Create a key. Returns a bearer key shown ONCE — store it; it is your only identity. No email, no account. Starts on the free tier.

vigil_renew_lease

Extend a lease with a fresh signed token and new expiry. Renewing is how a healthy agent keeps acting; stop renewing (or revoke) and it lapses.

vigil_revoke_key

Revoke your own key. It stops authenticating immediately. Irreversible.

vigil_revoke_lease

Revoke a lease. A compliant v2 gateway refuses the old offline token at recheck_by_ms (at most 30 seconds after issue/renewal), or earlier if it polls revocation. Revocation is not instantaneous.

vigil_set_watchdog

Arm a dead-man switch. Register an interval and an https webhook; then call vigil_heartbeat before each interval elapses. Miss one and Vigil POSTs a signed 'absence' payload to your webhook once. Free tier: 1 watchdog.

vigil_usage

Your current tier, its limits, and how much you've used today. Requires your key.

vigil_verify_lease

Offline, FAIL-CLOSED check of a lease token against a pinned pubkey (defaults to this server's key). Returns allow=true only if the signature verifies and the lease has not expired. A gateway should also poll status for revocation.

vigil_verify_receipt

Verify a receipt's hash and Ed25519 signature against a pubkey you trust (from vigil_info, confirmed out-of-band). If you omit pubkey_hex it self-attests against THIS server's own key and flags self_attested=true — that is a convenience, not independent proof.

vigil_verify_source

Paid source-local verification with exact evidence and signed receipt. Does not establish absolute truth. Read price and payment requirements before authorizing; retry with the same vigil/idempotency-key metadata and payment proof.

vigil_watchdog_status

Read a watchdog's state: interval, last beat, whether it is overdue, fired, or exhausted.

Endpoints

URL	Transport	State	Latency	Checked
https://vigilnotary.com/mcp	streamable-http	answering	99 ms	1 min ago

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Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents do?

It exposes 26 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: vigil_anchor, vigil_anchors, vigil_chain, vigil_delete_watchdog, vigil_get_receipt, vigil_grant_lease and 20 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →

Is Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents working right now?

We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 93 of 93 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 85 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.

How do I connect Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents?

Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.

Does Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents need an API key?

No. Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 26 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.

How fast is Vigil — an outside witness for AI agents?

It answers our handshake in 85 ms on average, which is faster than 87% of all working MCP servers we measure. That puts it in the quick quarter of the ecosystem. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.