Tollbooth Authority New England

The New England exit off the North American on-ramp.

Identity: npub157hmysd6sw7m8kkldycnnc74mssxp9nweddk2p5sw9l2nktr950qyxrenn Parent: tollbooth-authority-northamerica (npub1zummm…xd2t) Service: https://tollbooth-authority-newengland.fastmcp.app/mcp Neon region: aws-us-east-2 (Ohio)

A sub-regional Authority certified by NorthAmerica. The first 3-deep Authority chain in the DPYC ecosystem (Prime → NorthAmerica → NewEngland); operators serving New England patrons may choose NE to keep certification latency and audit trails as local as the protocol allows.

The metaphors in this project are drawn with admiration from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer (1961). We just built the payment infrastructure.

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Architecture

This repository is a thin consumer of the tollbooth-dpyc wheel's tollbooth.authority extension (wheel ≥ 0.22.1). The entire deployable surface lives in src/tollbooth_authority/server.py (~90 lines): a FastMCP instance, an OperatorRuntime, and two register_*_tools(mcp, runtime) calls. Onboarding state machine, Schnorr signer, replay tracker, Neon tenant provisioning, and the Authority @tool definitions are wheel-resident and shared with every other Authority MCP in the ecosystem.

NE was scaffolded from tollbooth-authority at the start (May 16, 2026) but is no longer a fork — wheel v0.22.0 collapsed every shared module into tollbooth.authority.*. The two repos now coexist as independent thin consumers of the same mixin, distinct only in identity, region, and Neon tenant.

For protocol semantics, certificate format, fee cascade, and tool catalog, see the canonical tollbooth-authority README.

Onboarding chain note

NE's onboarding (confirm_authority_claim → check_authority_approval) escalates to NorthAmerica, not Prime — the wheel's resolve_my_parent_npub reads NE's own upstream_authority_npub from the dpyc-community registry and routes the approval DM there. The 3-deep chain is transparent to the protocol; the registry is the source of truth.

Deploy

Two secrets required by Horizon:

Env var	Value
TOLLBOOTH_NOSTR_OPERATOR_NSEC	NE's nsec
NEON_DATABASE_URL	A pooled Neon connection string in aws-us-east-2

Everything else — BTCPay credentials for the cashier — arrives via Secure Courier post-deploy (see docs/how-to-add-authority.md in the community repo).

DPYC Ecosystem

NE is one Authority in the wider DPYC federation — a Social Contract of Operators and Authorities bound by transparent, auditable economic rules, with a Certification Chain cascading from the First Curator down through regional Authorities like this one.

• tollbooth-dpyc — shared Python SDK (all crypto, vault, auth, pricing, audit)
• dpyc-community — governance registry and onboarding docs
• dpyc-oracle — free community concierge (registry reads)
• tollbooth-authority — canonical Authority (certification backbone)
• tollbooth-sample — reference Operator implementation
• tollbooth-pricing-studio — native pricing editor (Swift/iOS)
• cypher-mcp — monetized graph answers (named Cypher over Neo4j/AuraDB)
• schwab-mcp — Schwab brokerage data
• thebrain-mcp — TheBrain knowledge graph
• excalibur-mcp — X/Twitter posting
• taxsort-mcp — tax sorting and classification
• optionality-mcp — options analytics
• tollbooth-oauth2-collector — OAuth2 callback collector
• tollbooth-shortlinks — URL shortener

License

Apache-2.0