VTR-1 · Implementers & Conformance

Anyone may implement it. Nobody may overclaim it.

VTR-1 is published under CC BY 4.0. You do not need permission, a licence, a membership, or our goodwill to implement it — including if you compete with its steward. The one thing you may not do is describe a credential as conforming to a Level whose requirements it does not meet. That single rule is what makes a Level mean anything.

This page is the requirement-level detail behind /build/ — start there for the five ways in.

§ 01The three conformance Levels

A Level is a claim, not a compliment.

LEVEL I
The result is real.
Proves in-circuit: strategy-to-returns evaluation on the committed data, costs charged before the verdict, and the gate applied as published. R-05.
LEVEL II
The result is real and the search is accounted for.
Additionally commits the trial ledger before evaluation, derives N from that commitment, and corrects for it. This is the Level that answers "how many did you try?". R-06.
LEVEL III
The result is real, the search is accounted for, and it was declared in advance.
Additionally satisfies pre-registration and forward-record requirements: the claim is anchored before the out-of-sample period it will be judged on. R-08.
The two duties

Every conforming credential must declare exactly one Level (R-04), and a conforming party must publish, per credential: the declared Level, the era hash, the committed data root, and a re-verifiable proof object (R-18). A credential that declares nothing declares nothing — it is not a stronger claim for being vague.

§ 02Registered implementations

The register — one entry, graded against ourselves.

ImplementationStatusConformance as published today
MIZAN engine, era v11
3ac3b10b
Reference
Partial
Publishes era hash, committed data root and a re-verifiable proof object for every credential, with an open verifier and a public registry that includes the issuer's own failures. It does not currently declare a conformance Level per credential, so R-04 and R-18 are unmet. Filed openly as IMPL-2026-001; Levels arrive in a future era — which, under era law, is a new judge with a new hash. Existing credentials are not re-issued and remain verifiable permanently.
No third-party implementations are registered. Implementing VTR-1 requires no registration — this table records those we know of, and an entry here is a record, not an endorsement. If you have implemented it, tell us and it is listed: [email protected]

A standards body that grades itself generously has already told you what its grades are worth.

Why the reference implementation is listed as partial

The alternative was to leave the Level unstated and let readers assume conformance. The first implementation held to VTR-1 in public is our own, and it currently falls short of two of its requirements. That is what the register is for.

§ 03Claiming conformance

How to say it, and how to be caught.

Publish, per credential: the declared Level, the era hash of the program that judged it, the committed data root, and a re-verifiable proof object. Test against the 9 public conformance vectors, which pass and fail on cue — an implementation that passes the failing vectors is not conforming, it is broken. Then say precisely what you meet: "conforms to VTR-1 at Level II" is a meaningful statement; "conforms to VTR-1" is not.

What conformance is not

It is not a certification issued by us, not a membership, and not something we can revoke — there is nothing to revoke, because we never granted it. A conformance claim is your claim, made against a public document, checkable by anyone against the vectors. If it is wrong, the standard gives readers the means to catch you. That is the whole design.

ENGINE v11 · 3ac3b10b… ● LIVE REGISTRY 77 CREDENTIALS · APPEND-ONLY VERIFY ~81 MS · OFFLINE · TRUSTING NO ONE ANCHOR BITCOIN #962,013 SPEC VTR-1 · FROZEN · CC BY ROOT 88298a2e…c6825a · MERKLE-COMMITTED