Rate Limits

Alpha Ladder does not publish specific numeric rate limits (requests per minute, concurrent connections, etc.) in this documentation. This page describes the expected behaviour, how to write well-behaved clients, and what to do if you need higher throughput.

General posture

Alpha Ladder's MCP server is designed for conversational and agentic workloads — a user asking questions or an automated pipeline running sequential compliance checks. The server applies rate controls appropriate to this usage model.

What this means in practice:

• Make requests at a pace consistent with the task at hand. Do not fire tool calls in tight loops or fan out many parallel calls simultaneously.
• If you receive an error response that indicates throttling or resource exhaustion, back off before retrying.
• For read-only tools (e.g. get_account_summary, get_deposit_list), a simple exponential backoff is appropriate: wait 1 second after the first failure, double on each subsequent failure, and cap at a reasonable ceiling (e.g. 30 seconds).

Destructive operations: never auto-retry

Certain tools execute irreversible financial actions. These must never be auto-retried on failure:

If any of these return an error, surface the error to the user and wait for explicit re-confirmation before submitting a new request. Silently retrying a withdrawal or trade confirmation is a safety violation.

For OTC-specific errors (410 Gone — quote expired, 409 Conflict — rate drift), the correct action is to call get_otc_quote again and present the updated quote to the user. See Status & Errors for the full error reference.

Handling backoff in code

When a read-only tool call fails with a transient error, apply exponential backoff:

async function callWithBackoff(toolFn, maxAttempts = 4) {
  for (let attempt = 0; attempt < maxAttempts; attempt++) {
    try {
      return await toolFn();
    } catch (err) {
      if (attempt === maxAttempts - 1) throw err;
      const delayMs = Math.min(1000 * 2 ** attempt, 30_000);
      await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, delayMs));
    }
  }
}

Do not apply this pattern to destructive operations.

Requesting higher throughput

Specific quotas are not published here. If your integration requires a throughput level beyond what the server permits, contact the Alpha Ladder team to discuss your use case. See Support for contact details.

Cross-references

• Status & Errors — full error shapes including OTC HTTP 410 / 409.
• Support — contact and escalation options.