Implement the standard — prove your implementation
Write an independent VTR-1 verifier in any language. The spec's 41 numbered requirements (R-01…R-41) plus the public conformance vectors mean your implementation is checkable against a public test set rather than against our word. Every independent implementation makes the standard more real and every credential more portable — a second implementation is the single most valuable thing an outside engineer can contribute.
Integrate verification — free, in your product
Your product's problem is trust in performance numbers that are self-reported today. Embed a "VTR-1 verified" check: listings carry credentials, your users re-verify them client-side or against the public registry API — trusting neither you nor us. Displaying and checking credentials is free at any scale. When your quants issue credentials at volume, issuance is licensed — that conversation lives on the partners page.
Bridge your research stack
Any strategy language or backtesting framework can grow a "mint a credential" export: compile your format to the MIZAN submission spec (open rules DSL), or — for logic the DSL can't express — emit the committed position stream for the sealed path, where the strategy never leaves its author's machine. The first external bridge (an open-source trading language) is in flight now; yours can be second.
Mint in CI — the credential as a build artifact
Wire minting into your research pipeline: every promoted strategy version automatically commits, proves against the locked gate, and chains its existing track forward as data accrues — the credential stops being a ceremony and becomes a routine build artifact your allocators can re-verify. Our own registry runs this way: the live track's chain extension fires automatically when its bar closes. Hosted minting via the app; fully-local minting via the offline engine for teams whose strategies never touch anyone's servers.
Extend the standard
VTR-1 is versioned and its evolution is public: propose a gate class for a new mandate (market-neutral shipped as the second class; yours could be third), a new statistical arm, or a v1.x extension. Frozen text changes only by erratum or new version — the era registry is append-only, so nothing you build on today's standard can be revoked out from under you. Replication studies and teaching material (a course capstone that mints a real credential) are extensions too, and the most welcome kind.
Free forever: verifying — offline, in-browser, in your product, at any scale; the spec (CC-BY); the conformance vectors; the registry API. Licensed: issuing credentials through our prover — per credential, at platform volume. Open even to rivals: the spec permits independent issuers — a standard nobody else may implement is just a proprietary format; a rival implementation is checkable against the public vectors rather than its own marketing. Ours alone, by design: the neutrality — one locked gate identical for everyone, refusals published, an append-only era registry. Anyone who profits from the strategies being judged is structurally conflicted out of judging them. The referee never plays; that is why every player can build here.
Building something on VTR-1 — or stuck on the spec? Write: [email protected]. Founding-window quants: the 25 named seats are the last free ones.