The statement warns that convenience-driven centralization threatens Ethereum’s fundamental trustless principles.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled a new “Trustless Manifesto,” designed to encourage decentralization, self-custody, and verifiability on the network.
The initiative, co-authored by Ethereum Foundation (EF) researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa, is based on the principle that Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient, but was created so that people can coordinate without trusting intermediaries.
Hidden centralization risks
team He argues The protocol begins to give up its basic identity the moment a central part, such as a hosted node or controlled relay, is used. They explained that although these decisions may seem insignificant at first, they gradually form a pattern that undermines unauthorized access, sacrificing efficiency and an improved user interface.
“The Manifesto is a statement of those values: trusted neutrality, self-guardianship, verifiability, and resistance to ‘convenient’ centralization.” books Team via X.
The document defines a system as truly untrustworthy only when any honest user can freely join, verify, and share without needing permission or fear of interference. This relies on each action being fully verifiable through public data and on ensuring that no single operator is essential to the system’s function.
EF also warns that simplicity built on dependence is not a sign of progress but of a loss of independence. “When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenient code can become a bottleneck,” the authors wrote.
Statement points Point to the increasing use of centralized infrastructure, such as major cloud providers hosting blockchain nodes, as evidence of this slow drift toward dependency. The recent Amazon Web Services outage highlighted the risks. Coinbase’s main chain saw its transaction capacity drop by about 25% when its AWS-hosted serializer went offline, while Arbitrum and Optimism continued to operate smoothly because they use multiple cloud providers.
Blockchains are urged to prioritize lack of trust over transaction volume
This message comes at a time when some layer 2 networks have faced criticism for seeking rapid scalability at the expense of complete decentralization. Optimism, Arbitrum and Base have all come under scrutiny for risks such as individual chain control and delays in decentralization plans due to limited community involvement in management.
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The authors propose a new way to evaluate a blockchain project’s long-term health by how much it reduces the reliance on trust each transaction has, rather than how many transactions it processes.
Developers who wish should take the pledge Calls Their wallet, read the statement, click “Sign Untrusted Statement Pledge,” then confirm the transaction. The initiative has already received support from several figures in the Ethereum community, including EF member Tom Tieman and a cryptocurrency researcher who goes by the pseudonym hitas.base.eth.
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