How VTR-1 changes, and what never does.

A rule that one company can change at will is a product. A certificate authority needs a published change process, a versioning promise and a path to a body that outlives the issuer. This charter states how VTR-1 and its profiles change, what never changes, and how MIZAN intends to hand the rule to a foundation.

• VTR-1 v1.0 (frozen 2026-08-01, 41 requirements R-01..R-41) and its conformance vectors.
• Profiles: /A Agent, /E Evaluation, /W Work (drafts), and future profiles.
• Engine eras (the circuits that implement the rule) and the verifier releases.
• The registry, the transparency log and the anchoring policy.

• Engines are superseded, never revoked. A credential verifies forever under the era that minted it.
• Every era is named, hashed and published before any credential under it is issued; the verifier for that era stays downloadable.
• A credential's page always names its era and image id.

• Frozen text is never edited. Corrections are errata, published beside the text with a date; substantive change is a new minor version (v1.1) with a diff.
• A new version never invalidates credentials minted under an older one.
• Profiles move DRAFT → REVIEW → FROZEN. A draft may change freely and says so on its page; nothing is minted under a draft.
• Gate status vocabulary on every surface: LIVE (in-circuit era) · DECLARED (commitment + registry, not in-circuit) · DRAFT (spec) · ROADMAP.

1. Proposal published on mizan.market/standard/ with rationale, text diff and affected clauses.
2. Review window: 30 days minimum; comments recorded publicly.
3. Decision recorded as a log leaf (kind note) with the sha256 of the adopted text.
4. Conformance vectors updated and re-published before the version is marked FROZEN.

Until a standards body exists, the decision is MIZAN's and is recorded as such; this charter does not pretend otherwise.

• The issuer never earns from the capital that moves on a credential. Any venue or routing business lives in a separate licensed entity with its own governance; the issuer charges flat fees.
• MIZAN's own records are subject to the same rule; refusals of MIZAN's own work are published.
• No credential is issued to a test identity; test identities are never counted.

• Trigger: the first outside issuer conformant with VTR-1, or the first allocator requirement citing VTR-1, whichever comes first.
• Then: the specification, the conformance vectors, the era registry and the right to the name "VTR-1" are assigned to a non-profit foundation with a published board; MIZAN remains one issuer among others.
• Until then: this charter, the public log and the conformance register are the accountability.

Not a licence (see the spec's CC BY), not terms of reliance (see /standard/terms-of-reliance/), not a promise of outcomes.

The issuer of VTR-1 credentials (Mizan Verification, Inc.) never earns from capital that moves on a credential: no share of profit, no routing fee, no custody, no escrow. Any venue, settlement or network business that earns from routed capital is a separate entity under its own licence and governance, with the standard's neutrality as a condition of its charter. Public pages that describe such a network describe that separate entity, not the issuer.