Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has written and signed a new “Trustless Declaration.” The declaration supports core values of decentralization and resistance to censorship and urges builders to refrain from adding intermediaries and checkpoints for implementation.
The Trustless Manifesto, written by fellow Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, states that crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the first moment they integrate hosted nodes or central relays, explaining that while it feels harmless, it becomes a habit, gradually making the protocol less permissionless with each checkpoint it passes.
“Trustlessness is not a feature we add after the fact; it is in and of itself,” Ethereum Foundation members said in a manifesto published Wednesday. “Without this, everything else, including efficiency, UX, and scalability, is just window dressing on a fragile core.”
“When complexity tempts you to centralize, you have to remember that every line of convenience code can be a challenge.”
Excerpt from “Trustless Declaration”. sauce: Trustlessness.eth
Although this manifesto was not targeted at any particular person or company, it does address some criticism that Ethereum Layer 2 sacrificed decentralization to focus on scalability to accelerate adoption.
“We measure success not in transactions per second, but in trust, which decreases with each transaction,” Buterin, Posner and Weiss said.
This dependence on intermediaries was directly exposed in last month’s Amazon Web Services crash. Coinbase’s Base chain lost around 25% of throughput when its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline, while Arbitrum and Optimism showed greater resilience and continued to work perfectly in a multi-cloud setup.
Several other contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem signed the manifesto, including Ethereum Foundation member Tom Teman and pseudonymous crypto researcher hitas.base.eth.
Buterin also wants to make Ethereum more cypherpunk.
The Trustlessness Manifesto is not the first manifesto promoted by Buterin. In December 2023, he advocated “cypherpunking Ethereum again” by promoting zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and other cryptographic solutions that enhance privacy.
Ethereum developers trapped as Wall Street’s interest grows
This comes as Ethereum has seen significant institutional adoption recently, starting with the Spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund in July 2023, and more recently, a growing trend for public companies to purchase cryptocurrencies to shore up their balance sheets.
However, the Ethereum Foundation and core developers remain focused on delivering on Ethereum’s technology roadmap to make the network as decentralized, self-sovereign, and censorship-resistant as possible.
