Governance

The APEX Standard is vendor-neutral and community-governed. Protocol changes follow an open RFC process overseen by the Technical Advisory Committee.

Technical Advisory Committee (TAC)

The APEX TAC has oversight of the protocol specification, conformance criteria, and governance process. The TAC ensures the standard remains vendor-neutral, technically sound, and responsive to the needs of both brokers and agent developers.

Read the TAC charter

RFC Process

All protocol changes go through the RFC (Request for Comments) process. This ensures every change is discussed, reviewed, and approved before becoming part of the specification.

Draft

Author submits RFC with rationale, spec changes, and migration impact

→
Discussion

14-30 day community review period

→
TAC Vote

Committee approval or revision request

→
Implementation

Merged into the specification

Versioning

APEX Protocol uses semantic versioning with a 12-month deprecation window for breaking changes.

MAJOR Breaking changes to core spec
MINOR New capabilities, new profiles (backwards compatible)
PATCH Clarifications, bug fixes, editorial

Stability Classes

The APEX alpha defines four stability classes that govern how protocol surfaces evolve. Changes follow an additive compatibility model — new optional fields, tools, and profiles are always compatible. Removing or renaming core surfaces is not.

Alpha Core

Tool namespaces, resource URI families, normative schemas, production profile names. Recognizable and stable across alpha.

Alpha Optional

Vendor extensions and broker-specific notifications outside the APEX namespace.

Alpha Experimental

Explicitly marked experimental capabilities. No stability promise.

Reserved

apex.*, apex://, and notifications/apex.* are reserved across all implementations.

Read the stability specification

Path to 1.0.0

The alpha phase has explicit exit criteria before the protocol can be considered for a 1.0.0 release candidate.

✓ Core vs optional surface frozen
✓ Normative schemas complete and published
○ Conformance validates full core set
○ Migration guidance for known alpha incompatibilities
○ At least one non-reference implementation validates
○ All profiles executably testable
View the alpha roadmap

Licensing

Specification

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0)

Free to use, share, and adapt with attribution

Reference Implementations

Apache License 2.0

Free to use in commercial and open-source projects

Contributing

We welcome contributions from brokers, agent developers, and the broader fintech community. Whether you're proposing a new profile, fixing a spec ambiguity, or adding conformance tests, the process is the same.

Read the contributing guide Join the discussion