§13 · Governance and versioning
Edited in the open. Profiles owned by the authorities.
CTRES is an open standard maintained by an editor. Authorities own their jurisdiction profiles. Changes are made in the open and published for comment before adoption.
Who does what
Three roles
Editor
Dmitry Skachko
Maintains the text, the schema, the register of profiles and the conformance suite, and publishes versions.
Authorities
Own their profiles. Corrections an authority makes to its own profile are adopted as submitted.
A profile is published as authority-confirmed when the authority concerned has reviewed it; until then it is labelled as researched from published sources.
Contributors
Operators, suppliers, auditors and associations comment through the public issue tracker at github.com/ctres-standard/spec or to hello@ctres.org. Substantive changes are published for comment before adoption.
Licences
Implement it without fee or permission
Any operator, supplier or authority may implement the Standard without fee or permission. The conformance suite is maintained separately; see Validator.
- CC BY 4.0
Text of the Standard
You may copy, adapt and redistribute it, including commercially, with attribution.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 - Apache 2.0
JSON Schema
Records R1–R12, the manifest and the structure of a jurisdiction profile.
ctres-standard/schema - Apache 2.0
validator-lite
Structural and Referential validation of a package.
ctres-standard/validator-lite
Take part
How to comment
Substantive changes are published for comment before adoption.
Open an issue
On github.com/ctres-standard/spec, citing the section or annex concerned.
Or write to us
At hello@ctres.org, or through the contact form. The Word edition is provided for tracked comments.
Authorities: correct your profile
Use “Correct this profile” on the profiles page. Corrections an authority makes to its own profile are adopted as submitted.
Versioning
What changes between versions
- MajorMajor versions change the record model
- MinorMinor versions add fields, rails or profiles
- PatchPatches correct text
Profiles, mapping files and the conformance suite are versioned separately.
Profiles carry effective dates, so a new rule, a market opening or a change of regulator becomes a new profile version rather than an edit (§5). Corrections to a submitted package are made by a new package that supersedes the earlier one (§8.2).
“CTRES Conformant” describes an implementation tested against a named conformance suite version. A claim states the suite and profile versions it was tested against.
Where a federal or provincial system has several licensing bodies, a profile may inherit from a shared base and override only what differs (§5).
Advisory Circle
Help shape the draft
The editor is forming an Advisory Circle, an informal group that advises the editor on the draft until the working group described in §13 is convened. Authorities and practitioners — operators, payment providers, auditors and associations — who are interested in taking part are invited to write.
The editor proposes to convene a working group of authorities and practitioners once at least three authorities have reviewed their profiles.
§14
Roadmap
The planned steps towards version 1.1.
- October 2026CTRES v1.0, universal edition, published as a draft for consultationYou are here
- Q4 2026Authorities review their profiles; corrections adopted as submittedAuthorities, editor
- Q1 2027Pilots with volunteer operators across at least three rail mixes: cards and bank transfers; mobile money; virtual assetsOperators, editor
- Q2 2027Version 1.1 with confirmed profiles, versioned mappings to existing formats, and the conformance suite versioned alongsideEditor
- From July 2027Alignment review as the EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 begins to applyEditor, with EU authorities