Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has introduced a new initiative titled “The Trustless Manifesto,” a comprehensive statement on preserving decentralization, transparency, and neutrality in blockchain design. Co-authored with Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, the document warns against growing dependency on intermediaries in crypto infrastructure and calls for a recommitment to trustless architecture, systems governed by math and consensus, not human discretion.
A call to rebuild on principle
Published on Wednesday, The Trustless Manifesto outlines nine sections emphasizing that decentralization is not a convenience but an obligation for builders. The authors argue that while blockchain systems often begin with noble intent, habits like adopting hosted nodes or centralized relayers slowly chip away at their neutrality.
“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 manifesto states.
Over time, such dependencies transform permissionless systems into platforms where intermediaries control access.
The document explicitly warns against the creeping normalization of convenience-led centralization:
“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.”
Buterin, Weiss, and Posner assert that Ethereum was never created to make financial systems or applications simply more efficient. Its purpose, they write, is “to set people free — to empower anyone, anywhere to coordinate without permission and without trusting anyone they cannot hold accountable.”
The cost and necessity of trustlessness
The authors concede that designing truly trustless systems comes with trade-offs. Decentralized networks are inherently complex, requiring redundancy, openness, and resilience. These traits can make development slower and more expensive, but they safeguard freedom by removing choke points of control.
“When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point,” the authors wrote.
The document also defines “trustless” through specific design principles, including self-sovereignty, verifiability, censorship resistance, and transparency of incentives. Its core proposition is that no critical secrets should exist, no intermediaries should be indispensable, and every system outcome should remain publicly verifiable.
A subtle critique of modern Layer-2 networks
While The Trustless Manifesto does not name any projects directly, the message resonates at a time when parts of Ethereum’s ecosystem, particularly Layer-2 networks, are under scrutiny for prioritizing speed over decentralization. The authors emphasize that performance should never outweigh neutrality.
“We measure success not by transactions per second, but by trust reduced per transaction,” wrote Buterin, Posner, and Weiss.
This principle was underscored by a recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that affected Coinbase’s Base chain. The network experienced about a 25% reduction in throughput after its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline. In contrast, Arbitrum and Optimism, both using multi-cloud setups, maintained functionality, demonstrating how centralized dependencies compromise availability.
Builders’ duty and pledge for openness
In the manifesto’s later sections, the authors frame decentralization as an ethical duty for protocol developers:
“We who design protocols are stewards, not gatekeepers. Our duty is not to build what is easiest, but what remains open and self-sovereign.”
They caution that while users may choose convenience, the underlying protocol must never require reliance on an intermediary.
The document closes with “The Pledge,” a public commitment for developers and users to uphold trustless principles:
“We refuse to build on infrastructure we cannot replace. We refuse to call a system ‘permissionless’ when only the privileged can participate.”
Those who sign the manifesto will have their signatures recorded permanently on Ethereum mainnet through a dedicated smart contract.
Reinforcing Ethereum’s cypherpunk roots
The Trustless Manifesto follows a line of efforts by Buterin to re-emphasize Ethereum’s philosophical foundations. In December 2023, he published an essay advocating to “make Ethereum cypherpunk again,” arguing for privacy-preserving tools like zero-knowledge proofs and account abstraction to empower users rather than platforms.
The release also comes amid growing institutional engagement with Ethereum, from the launch of spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds in July 2023 to corporations adding ETH reserves to diversify their portfolios. Despite this mainstream momentum, the Ethereum Foundation and its contributors continue to emphasize that scaling progress must not come at the cost of decentralization.
Endorsements and future implications
The manifesto has already gained support within the Ethereum community. Ethereum Foundation member Tom Teman and pseudonymous researcher hitas.base.eth have publicly signed it, signaling a broader cultural movement toward reasserting decentralization as a guiding principle for layer design.
Signed the trustless manifesto ⤵️https://t.co/AaQ97YlZCt https://t.co/cmlNvVEpPg pic.twitter.com/80kkBeB8c8
— hitas.base.eth (@hitasyurek) November 13, 2025
By urging developers to prioritize open verification over comfort, Buterin and his co-authors have reignited a philosophical conversation about what it truly means to build permissionless technology. The Trustless Manifesto argues that only through adherence to these principles can Ethereum remain what it was always meant to be, not merely a platform for innovation, but a foundation for freedom built on trustless design.
Oleksii Shumak
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