Key Highlights
- The Trustlessness Manifesto cements Ethereum’s mission to remove all reliance on intermediaries.
- Vitalik Buterin and co-authors warn that convenience-driven shortcuts erode decentralization.
- Developers are urged to act as stewards, ensuring Ethereum remains open, neutral, and verifiable.
The Ethereum Foundation has released a new document called the “Trustlessness Manifesto.” It was written by Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin, together with researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner.
The manifesto says Ethereum’s main goal is to let people cooperate, make transactions, and use the network without depending on any middleman. It makes sure users keep control of their own money and that everything is open for anyone to check.
The manifesto itself is stored on Ethereum in a smart contract that has no owner and no admins. The contract only has one job, called pledge(). This function records a user’s address along with the time they first made the pledge, and it sends out a Pledged event so everyone can see it. This setup makes the manifesto permanent, unchangeable, and verifiable by anyone at any time.
Why trustlessness matters
The manifesto highlights the danger of slowly giving power to intermediaries. “Every system begins with good intentions. A hosted node here, a whitelisted relayer there. Each is harmless on its own — and together they become habit,” the authors write.
They explain that platforms can gradually turn into “landlords” who control access and actions. Trustless systems, in contrast, rely on mathematics and consensus rather than human goodwill. “Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself. Without it, everything else — efficiency, UX, scalability — is decoration on a fragile core,” the manifesto states.
Why Ethereum
Ethereum is chosen as a foundation for trustlessness because it favors verification over blind trust. According to the authors, “We write code so that power cannot hide behind policy. We design protocols so that freedom does not depend on permission.”
The manifesto emphasizes that Ethereum was not created for efficiency or convenience, but to give anyone, anywhere, the ability to coordinate freely without depending on unaccountable intermediaries.
What trustlessness means
A system is trustless when anyone can join, verify, and act without permission or fear. The manifesto says this requires users to control their own actions, public verification of all events, resistance to censorship, continuity even if some operators fail, accessibility for ordinary users, and transparent incentives.
Removing any of these elements, the authors warn, shifts a protocol toward centralization and away from neutral ground.
The costs and laws of trustlessness
The manifesto explains that maintaining trustlessness is expensive. It requires openness, redundancy, complex governance, public mempools, and clients that anyone can run.
The manifesto gives three important rules: don’t keep any critical secrets, don’t rely on any middleman that can’t be replaced, and make sure everything that happens can be checked by anyone. Every action on the network should be visible, and anyone taking part should be replaceable. These rules are strict, but the authors say they are needed to make sure Ethereum stays open for everyone.
The drift toward dependence
The manifesto warns that centralization often happens slowly through convenience. Hosted RPCs, centralized sequencing in some rollups, and reliance on upgrade keys or “training wheels” may feel harmless but create dependence on a few actors.
The authors note, “Trust does not return all at once. It returns through defaults slowly. Each choice feels harmless, temporary — not like centralization. No capture, no coup — just comfort.”
A recent AWS outage illustrated this risk. Coinbase’s Base chain lost roughly 25% of its throughput due to a sequencer hosted on AWS, while Arbitrum and Optimism stayed fully operational with multi-cloud setups.
Delegation vs. Dependence
Delegation is allowed, but the system must never require it. If participation depends on intermediaries, the system is no longer trustless.
The authors cite email as an example: while anyone can technically run a mail server, spam filters and blocklists have made ordinary participation difficult, effectively centralizing the system.
The duty of builders
The manifesto tells developers that they are caretakers, not controllers. Even small convenience features in the code can become points where power is concentrated. The manifesto reminds developers that they are stewards, not gatekeepers. Every convenience feature in the code can become a point where control is concentrated.
Building trustless systems takes work, computing resources, and careful planning, but it makes the system strong, stable, neutral, and free. It also needs to include rewards for participants without giving anyone extra control.
Preserving Ethereum’s core principles
As Ethereum grows, the manifesto says users should stay in control of their actions. Anyone should be able to see what is happening and take part freely. The rules should be in the code, not in private agreements. Joining in should be based on fair rewards, not on permission or reputation.
“Trustlessness is not perfection. It is a system that fails publicly, transparently, and recoverably — rather than privately and silently,” the authors write.
Looking ahead
The release of the Trustless Manifesto aligns with Vitalik Buterin’s previous push to make Ethereum more cypherpunk through zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and privacy-enhancing solutions. The document serves as both a warning and a roadmap, urging builders to resist centralization and keep Ethereum permissionless, neutral, and trustless.
“Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself. When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point,” the manifesto concludes.
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