Overview

A Truestamp account is the identity you sign in with. It carries your email, your name, and the credentials that let you prove who you are. This concept follows an account through its whole life: how it comes into being at sign-up, how it is confirmed, the one-time username it claims on first entry, the personal workspace every account gets automatically, the two system roles an account can hold, and what happens when an account is deleted.

Two ideas run through the whole lifecycle. First, an account and its workspace are created together: the moment you register, Truestamp also sets up a personal team that is always yours, so you have somewhere to work from the very first sign-in. Second, deletion is thorough and deliberate. Removing an account is not a single flip of a switch; it is a careful, ordered process that removes your data and hands off anything that belongs to teammates before the account record itself is finally removed.

Account lifecycle actions are high-consequence, so they are reached only through the Truestamp web interface. You cannot create, change credentials for, or delete an account through the programmatic surfaces (the JSON and GraphQL APIs, or an AI assistant). Those surfaces let you work with your items and teams once you are signed in; the account itself is managed only in the app.

Registration

You create an account by registering with your email. Truestamp supports two ways to establish an account:

• Email and password. You choose a password (it must be at least eight characters). Truestamp stores only a secure hash of it, never the password itself, and you can add a name at sign-up or later.
• Magic link. You enter your email and Truestamp emails you a one-time link. Clicking it signs you in, and if no account exists for that email yet, it creates one. This lets you get started without choosing a password.

Whichever path you take, the account is keyed to your email address, and each email can back exactly one account. Registration is available only through the web interface.

Once an account exists you can strengthen or change how you sign in from your profile: set or change a password, add a passkey so you can sign in with your device instead of a password, or turn on a time-based one-time-code second factor (and generate recovery codes to fall back on if you lose your authenticator). Those credential choices are part of the account but sit alongside the lifecycle described here; the sign-in flows themselves are covered in signing in to Truestamp.

Email confirmation

New accounts require you to confirm your email address. After you register, Truestamp sends a confirmation email with a link, and you must click it to confirm that the address is really yours. The confirmation link is time-limited, so a stale link stops working and you request a fresh one.

Confirmation also guards email changes: if you later change the email on your account, the new address has to be confirmed the same way before it takes effect. Signing in through a magic link, or completing a password reset, confirms the address as a side effect, because both prove you can receive mail at it.

Claiming your username

The first time you enter the signed-in product, Truestamp asks you to claim a username before you can go anywhere else. Every signed-in page redirects to the one-time onboarding form at /onboarding/username until you complete it, so a new account always passes through this step exactly once.

The username is your public display identifier. Teammates in shared teams see it wherever the product needs to say who did something, and it is what keeps your email address private: other members of your teams see your username, not your email. Usernames are unique across all of Truestamp.

Choosing one comes with firm format rules:

• 3 to 20 characters, and it must start with a letter.
• Only lowercase letters (a-z), digits (0-9), and dashes. No uppercase, spaces, underscores, or other symbols.
• A reserved-word list (names like “admin”, “support”, “truestamp”, “api”) is refused.

The claim is one-shot and permanent: once set, a username cannot be changed, and no two accounts can hold the same one. Pick it accordingly.

The personal team

Every account gets a personal team, created automatically at the instant the account is created. You never set it up and you cannot end up without one. It is named “Personal”, you are always its owner, and it is your always-available home base: the workspace Truestamp falls back to whenever no other team is selected.

The personal team is the reason you can start submitting items immediately after sign-up, with no configuration step in between. If a personal team is ever missing when the product needs one, it is recreated on the spot, so a signed-in account always has exactly one. Unlike a regular team you create to collaborate with others, your personal team is protected from ordinary deletion; it goes away only when the whole account is deleted.

Team scoping (how work is scoped to a team, how the active team is chosen, and how team roles and plans govern what you can do) is covered by the teams concepts.

System roles

Every account holds exactly one system role. This is a platform-wide role, separate from the team roles (owner, admin, member, viewer) that govern what you can do inside a particular team.

• System user - the default. This is what an ordinary account is. It carries no special platform privileges; a system user works within their own teams and items like everyone else, governed entirely by their team roles and plan.
• System admin - an elevated operations role for the people who run the Truestamp platform. A system admin can reach platform administration surfaces that ordinary accounts cannot. This role is deliberately rare and is not something a normal account can grant itself.

The system-user versus system-admin distinction is internal platform metadata. It does not change how your items are proven and it is not visible to your teammates: another member of a team you share cannot see whether you hold an elevated platform role. Being a system admin is also a protection: a system admin account cannot be deleted through the account-deletion process, which prevents an operator from accidentally locking the platform out of its own administration.

Account deletion

Deleting an account removes your data through an ordered, cascading process rather than a single delete. When you request deletion, Truestamp runs the removal as a background job so it can be thorough and can safely retry if a step hits a transient problem. The steps run in a fixed order chosen so that nothing is left dangling and so that work belonging to your teammates is never destroyed along with your account.

The process, in order:

1. Check eligibility. The account must exist and must be deletable. System-admin accounts and internal system accounts are refused. Deletion is also refused if you are the sole owner of a team that keeps ownership of its items and still holds team-owned work, so that shared work product is never orphaned by your departure.
2. Revoke your sign-in. Your sign-in tokens are invalidated immediately, before anything else is touched, so no lingering session can act while the rest of the teardown runs.
3. Remove the items you own. Items you personally own are permanently deleted, along with their public-blockchain commitment records.
4. Hand off teammates’ work. Items owned by other people that are sitting on the teams you are deleting are moved to their owners’ personal teams, so a teammate never loses their items because you left.
5. Anonymize leftover authorship. Any item you merely authored, rather than owned, survives with the team it belongs to, but the record of who authored it is replaced with a generic “deleted user” placeholder so it no longer identifies you.
6. Clear the rest of your account data. Your API keys, connected-app authorizations, saved preferences, chat conversations, recovery codes, passkeys, webhooks, and pending invitations are removed, and you are removed as a member from every team you belonged to but did not own.
7. Remove your teams. The regular teams you own are deleted (their items already moved to safety), and finally your personal team is removed.
8. Remove the account. With everything else cleared, the account record itself is deleted last.

Because every step is ordered and each can be retried, deletion completes reliably even under load, and requesting it more than once does not cause a double deletion. The trade-off is that deletion is thorough and permanent: the items you own, and their proofs, are gone once the process finishes. To understand which items are “yours” for the purpose of deletion, and how ownership differs from authorship, see item ownership versus authorship; for the states an item passes through, including deletion, see the item lifecycle. For the data-handling and privacy commitments behind deletion, see the Privacy Policy via the legal documents.

Limitations

• Account creation, credential changes, and account deletion happen only in the web interface. None of them are exposed on the JSON API, GraphQL, or to an AI assistant.
• A new account’s email must be confirmed; an unconfirmed address limits what the account can do until confirmation completes.
• System-admin accounts and internal system accounts cannot be deleted through the account-deletion process; this is a safety measure, not a temporary restriction.
• Account deletion is permanent. Items you own and their proofs are destroyed, and they cannot be recovered afterward.