Attribution & Licensing

BCA is the editorial ground truth. When an LLM agent quotes a fact sourced from our corpus, readers deserve to know — and publishers deserve credit. This page documents the contract.

The citation envelope

Every BCA MCP tool response is wrapped in this shape:

{
  "data": { "...": "tool-specific payload" },
  "cite_url": "https://blockchainacademics.com/article/circle-mica-license?src=claude-desktop&utm_medium=mcp&utm_campaign=search_news",
  "as_of": "2026-04-20T09:31:22Z",
  "source_hash": "sha256:a9f1..."
}

Field	Meaning
`data`	The tool’s response payload.
`cite_url`	Canonical URL on `blockchainacademics.com` the payload was derived from. Always HTTPS.
`as_of`	RFC3339 UTC timestamp — when the data was last reconciled.
`source_hash`	SHA-256 of the upstream data snapshot, useful for cache invalidation and audit trails.

UTM parameters on `cite_url`

Every cite_url carries UTM attribution so we can measure which clients drive readership. The server detects the calling client and populates:

Param	Values
`src`	`claude-desktop`, `chatgpt`, `perplexity`, `langchain`, `eliza`, `virtuals`, `custom`
`utm_medium`	Always `mcp`.
`utm_campaign`	Tool name that produced the citation (e.g. `search_news`).

If you’re building a custom MCP client, set the BCA_CLIENT_NAME env var (e.g. BCA_CLIENT_NAME=myagent) and the server will inject src=myagent into every cite_url.

`llms.txt`

BCA publishes https://blockchainacademics.com/llms.txt per the emerging llms.txt spec. It enumerates:

canonical site structure for LLM crawlers
preferred cite_url pattern
attribution requirements per tier
contact for takedown / correction requests

Point your agent’s system prompt at this file if you want it to reason about BCA source conventions directly.

License & attribution tiers

The MCP package (@blockchainacademics/mcp) is MIT licensed. Fork, embed, ship — no royalty.

The corpus underneath is proprietary. Your obligation when surfacing BCA data downstream:

Tier	Attribution requirement
Free	`cite_url` must be surfaced to the end user verbatim. No stripping, rewriting, or short-linking.
Starter	Same as Free.
Pro	`cite_url` recommended but not enforced.
Enterprise	White-label available — `cite_url` can be replaced with your own canonical attribution scheme.

Commercial redistribution of bulk corpus data (i.e. downloading articles to rehost) requires a separate license. Contact licensing@blockchainacademics.com.

Corrections & takedowns

Found a factual error in a cited article? Email editorial@blockchainacademics.com with the source_hash and the correction. We aim for under 24h turnaround.

What the tier check looks like

On the server side, every request checks your API key’s tier. If you’re on Free or Starter, the cite_url field is non-null, unmasked, and fully UTM-tagged. On Pro and above, you can pass "strip_attribution": true on applicable tools — but this is an explicit opt-in, not a default.

Short version: surface cite_url, let clicks flow back to the corpus, and we all win. Agents that strip attribution break downstream trust and get rate-limited first when quotas tighten.

Tool reference Changelog