What is a gate, exactly?

A condition that has to be satisfied before an agreement moves on. It carries a name in your own words, one of nine kinds, the participants it waits on, its state, and its place in the stage order. A trust funding, a SAFE round, and a note are all different arrangements of them.

What can an agent tell me that a document can’t?

Which gate is open, who it waits on, and what evidence is outstanding, across every agreement at once. A signed PDF knows none of that. Ask what is holding a funding schedule and the answer is a specific gate and a specific institution, not a summary.

What closes a gate on a stock transfer or a deed?

The system of record, not the party. Securities close on the transfer agent’s updated registration or a broker statement showing the retitled position; real property closes on the county-recorded instrument with its stamp and number. A signed deed still in the mail leaves the gate open.

Can an agent close a gate itself?

No. Gates close by the party they name: a participant signs, an institution’s evidence arrives, a member with authority accepts it. What an agent gets is the whole structure: it can set the agreement up, read every gate, and drive the follow-up to the people who can close them.

What happens when the agent wants to send the agreement?

It proposes. Two acts never execute from the connection: publishing, which is the moment participants are actually emailed, and cancelling. The agent gets back a confirmation link; a signed-in member reads a summary built from exactly what the agent asked for and confirms or declines. Undecided proposals expire after 72 hours.

How does an agent connect?

Any MCP client, pointed at the /mcp endpoint, authenticated with an organization-scoped token created in the app under Settings → API and webhooks. Tokens are read-only or read-and-write and expire in ninety days.

An agent can see exactly what the transfer is waiting on.

Every asset agreement here runs as an ordered set of gates, and each gate names its condition, the person or institution it waits on, and the evidence that closes it. Connect an MCP client and that structure is what it reads, so “what’s holding the trust funding” comes back as a gate, an actor, and a missing document.

A gate is a condition with an address

Nine kinds cover the work: signature details, a signed document, an approval, an uploaded proof, a scheduled date, an authorized payment, a confirmed receipt, answers to questions, a verified identity. Each carries the same fields, so an agent handles a deed the way it handles a wire.

What the gate carries	What an agent does with it
Its condition, in your words	Repeats it verbatim. “Recorded deed returned from the county” needs no translation before an operator can act on it.
Its kind, from the fixed nine	Branches on it. Chasing a signature and chasing a transfer agent’s registration are different jobs, and the kind says which one this is.
Who it waits on	Builds a per-person list. The participants carry stable identifiers, so the same person’s gates across four agreements collect into one call.
Its state: waiting, done, or blocked	Tells not yet apart from stuck. A blocked gate carries the reason it stopped, which is usually the thing worth escalating.
Its place in the stage order	Reports what is genuinely next rather than everything outstanding. A gate in a later stage is visible but not yet doable, and that ordering is deliberate.
Its questions, on question gates	Reads what is being asked of a participant and what has come back, so a follow-up names the two fields still missing instead of resending the whole request.

A draft names its own remaining blockers · Every gate names its actor · Ordering is enforced server-side

One asset, gate by gate

Moving stock into a trust is four conditions in a fixed order, and an agent can read every one of them at any moment. The interesting entry is always the first one still waiting.

Stock transfer into the trust · four gates

Read straight from the agreement, in stage order.

Done	Signature details confirmed — the trustee’s exact name and capacity on the transfer request
Done	Document signed — the transfer request, both signatures in
Waiting	Proof uploaded — the transfer agent’s updated registration. Waiting on the broker, not on anyone at the firm.
Later	Transfer confirmed — cannot open until the registration is on file, and the asset is not funded until it does

A demonstration, not a customer record.

An agent asked what is holding this transfer answers with the third row and the broker’s name. It does not summarize a PDF, and it does not guess.

Each asset closes its gate differently

The evidence that satisfies a confirmation gate is set by the kind of asset, not by whoever is asking. An agent working a funding schedule knows which record to chase for each line on it.

The asset	What the gate is waiting for	What will not close it
Funds	The receiving bank’s own record that the money posted.	The sender saying it went out. That is a claim, and it is stored as one.
Securities	The transfer agent’s updated registration, or a broker statement showing the retitled position.	A screenshot of a pending request, or a confirmation number alone.
Real property	The county-recorded instrument with its recording stamp, number, and date.	A signed and notarized deed that has not come back from the recorder yet.
Account designations	The institution’s written confirmation, or the updated account profile showing it.	A submitted form, however carefully it was filled in.
Titled vehicles	The new title or registration in the transferee’s name.	The signed-over title in an envelope, before the state records it.
Personal property	The receiver’s signed acknowledgement identifying the item.	Nothing stronger exists for a painting or a machine, and the record says so plainly rather than implying an authority that has no registry.

Recording that the evidence exists is Termn’s job. Whether it is legally sufficient is counsel’s, and no gate closing here says otherwise.

Sending is a gate with a person on it

Setup and reading are the agent’s to do, and every gate above is closed by the party it names. The one moment that reaches your participants belongs to a member of your organization, on the same terms as everything else.

Straight through

Same authorization, validation, and audit as the app.

Sets the deal up. Contacts, a workspace, a draft agreement inside it, participants attached with their roles. Drafting contacts nobody, and the first workspace is free.
Reads every gate. Across one agreement or the whole ledger: what is owed, who is next, what is blocked and why.
Names the remaining blockers. A draft reports exactly what still keeps it from going out, so an agent can finish the setup instead of guessing at it.
Retries without duplicating. Every creating call takes an idempotency key, and repeating it replays the original result.

Through a person

The proposal is a record that waits for an answer.

It proposes the send. Publishing is the moment participants are actually emailed, and neither it nor cancelling executes from the connection. The agent records the request and gets back a confirmation link.
A member sees the exact effect. The summary is built from the parameters captured when the agent asked, not from whatever the agreement looks like by then.
They confirm, decline, or let it lapse. Confirming executes as that member’s own act, under every ordinary precondition. Silence expires it after 72 hours.
The agent reads the outcome. Pending, confirmed, declined, or expired, along with what the person said when they decided.

What a gate never does

These hold for every call, whatever the client and however it is phrased.

Close on a claim: A party reporting that they sent, filed, or delivered something is recorded as their claim. The gate closes when the kind-appropriate evidence is in and a person with authority accepts it.
Move out of order: Stages run in sequence and a caller cannot reorder them, skip one, or open a gate early. Putting identity checks before signing is the entire point of the ordering.
Reveal what sits behind it: A payment gate tells an agent its state and who confirmed it. Wire instructions, bank facts, tokens, and webhook secrets appear in no tool result at all.
Reach across organizations: Every call is scoped to the one organization its token belongs to. Anything outside reads as not found, with no hint that it exists.
Close quietly: Each call writes an audit row in the transaction it commits: the token, the tool, the objects, the outcome. Your own text and participants’ details stay out of logs.
Certify anything: A closed gate means the required evidence exists and someone accepted it. It is not a ruling that a transfer was legally effective, and no surface here pretends otherwise.

Connecting takes a token and an endpoint

Point any MCP client at https://termn.ai/mcp and authenticate with a token created in the app under Settings → API and webhooks. A token belongs to one organization, carries either read-only or read-and-write access, and expires in ninety days. Every tool runs the same audited API operation underneath, so a tool cannot gain a power the API lacks. Calling that API directly instead is the other door: the reference lists every operation, generated from the schema the tools are built from.

Most clients take a remote server as a URL plus a bearer header. For clients that read a JSON server config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "termn": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://termn.ai/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer termn_…" }
    }
  }
}

To smoke-test the connection without any client, speak the protocol directly — initialize answers with the server's own workflow guide, the best short orientation to how gates, drafts, and proposals fit together:

curl -s https://termn.ai/mcp \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TERMN_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize",
       "params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},
                 "clientInfo":{"name":"smoke-test","version":"0"}}}'
# Then list the tools:
#   ... -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/list"}'

The connection itself costs nothing, and drafting through it is free exactly as it is in the app. $149 activates the workspace when you are ready to send. See all pricing. Working a funding schedule? Trust funding is where these gates get their heaviest use.

Common questions

What is a gate, exactly?: A condition that has to be satisfied before an agreement moves on. It carries a name in your own words, one of nine kinds, the participants it waits on, its state, and its place in the stage order. A trust funding, a SAFE round, and a note are all different arrangements of them.
What can an agent tell me that a document can’t?: Which gate is open, who it waits on, and what evidence is outstanding, across every agreement at once. A signed PDF knows none of that. Ask what is holding a funding schedule and the answer is a specific gate and a specific institution, not a summary.
What closes a gate on a stock transfer or a deed?: The system of record, not the party. Securities close on the transfer agent’s updated registration or a broker statement showing the retitled position; real property closes on the county-recorded instrument with its stamp and number. A signed deed still in the mail leaves the gate open.
Can an agent close a gate itself?: No. Gates close by the party they name: a participant signs, an institution’s evidence arrives, a member with authority accepts it. What an agent gets is the whole structure: it can set the agreement up, read every gate, and drive the follow-up to the people who can close them.
What happens when the agent wants to send the agreement?: It proposes. Two acts never execute from the connection: publishing, which is the moment participants are actually emailed, and cancelling. The agent gets back a confirmation link; a signed-in member reads a summary built from exactly what the agent asked for and confirms or declines. Undecided proposals expire after 72 hours.
How does an agent connect?: Any MCP client, pointed at the /mcp endpoint, authenticated with an organization-scoped token created in the app under Settings → API and webhooks. Tokens are read-only or read-and-write and expire in ninety days.