Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published the “Trustless Manifesto”. This is a comprehensive call to the blockchain development community to guard against the slow erosion of decentralization.
The document, released with collaboration from the Ethereum Foundation’s Account Abstraction team, is now permanently inscribed on-chain as both a declaration and a technical standard for protocol design.
Core Principles of the Manifesto
The manifesto sets out a series of foundational values meant to reinforce the ethos of trustlessness that underpins Ethereum and similar decentralized systems. It emphasizes trust neutrality, self-custody, verifiability, and active resistance to the “convenient” adoption of centralized infrastructure or intermediaries.
Practical test points include all significant protocol functions, which must be checkable and reproducible from public data, with no hidden or unverifiable outcomes. Additionally, no operational step should depend on secrets controlled by any party except the user; server-side custodians and hosted keys experience rejection as single points of failure.
Finally, protocols should be independent of operators or intermediaries who cannot be freely replaced by anyone else following established rules; requiring genuine permissionless access, not just theoretical openness.
Vitalik Identifies Threats to Decentralization
Buterin and co-authors highlight subtle threats to decentralization, such as the increasing reliance on major cloud providers, trusted RPC endpoints, and non-transparent relays. The manifesto warns that centralized “conveniences” quickly become dependencies, undermining resistance and neutrality, and restricting who can participate or verify outcomes. It argues for resilience through redundancy, open verification, and operational friction, even at the expense of speed or user interface improvements.
Key warnings from the document include:
- Every shortcut, whitelisted relays, hosted nodes, or off-chain state cumulatively creates systems only the privileged can run or verify, rolling back the decentralization that blockchains should guarantee.
- Protocols that outsource neutrality or verifiability may offer higher efficiency, but become fragile and exclusionary, prone to governance capture or legal coercion.
The Trustless Manifesto concludes that integrity in decentralized systems requires continuous resistance, not just consensus or math, but proactive design and invites developers to sign the pledge, with each address and timestamp recorded on Ethereum mainnet.
Vitalik’s manifesto appeals for blockchain builders to measure success by reduced trust required per transaction, not by throughput, and calls for developers to commit to architectures where fairness and correctness depend only on mathematics and consensus, rather than trusted intermediaries.
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