Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed the new “Trustless Manifesto,” designed to encourage decentralization, self-custody, and verifiability on the network.
Co-authored by Ethereum Foundation (EF) researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa, the initiative is based on the principle that Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient, but was made so people could coordinate without trust in intermediaries.
Hidden Centralization Risks
The team argues that a protocol begins to compromise its core identity the moment a centralized part, like a hosted node or a controlled relayer, is used. They explained that while these decisions may appear insignificant at first, they gradually form a pattern that undermines permissionless access, which sacrifices efficiency and a refined user interface.
“The manifesto is a statement of those values: credible neutrality, self-custody, verifiability, and resistance to ‘convenient’ centralization,” wrote the team via X.
The document defines a system as truly trustless only when any honest user can join, verify, and take part freely without needing permission or fearing interference. This depends on every action being fully verifiable through public data and on ensuring that no single operator becomes essential to the system’s function.
The EF also warns that simplicity built on reliance is not a sign of progress but a loss of independence. “When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point,” the authors wrote.
The manifesto points to the growing use of centralized infrastructure, such as major cloud providers hosting blockchain nodes, as proof of this slow drift toward dependence. The recent Amazon Web Services outage highlighted the risk. Coinbase’s Base chain saw its transaction capacity drop by about 25% when its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline, while Arbitrum and Optimism continued running smoothly because they use multiple cloud providers.
Blockchains Urged to Prioritize Trustlessness Over Transaction Volume
This message comes at a time when some Layer 2 networks have faced criticism for chasing fast scalability at the expense of full decentralization. Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base have gotten scrutiny for risks like single sequencer control and delayed decentralization plans due to limited community participation in governance.
The authors propose a new way to assess the long-term health of a blockchain project by how much it reduces reliance on trust with every transaction, instead of by how many transactions it processes.
Developers who want to take the pledge must connect their wallet, read the manifesto, click “Sign the Trustless Manifesto Pledge,” and confirm the transaction. The initiative has already gained support from several figures in the Ethereum community, including EF member Tom Teman and pseudonymous crypto researcher hitas.base.eth.
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