Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has authored and signed the new “Trustless Manifesto,” which seeks to uphold core values of decentralization and censorship resistance and push builders to refrain from adding intermediaries and checkpoints for the sake of adoption.
The Trustless Manifesto, also authored by Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, said crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the first moment that they integrate a hosted node or centralized relayer — explaining that while it feels harmless, it becomes a habit, and with each passing checkpoint, the protocol becomes less and less permissionless.
“Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the Ethereum Foundation members said in the manifesto published Wednesday. “Without it, everything else — efficiency, UX, scalability — is decoration on a fragile core.”
“When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point.”
While the manifesto wasn’t aimed at any particular person or company, some Ethereum layer 2s have copped criticism for sacrificing decentralization in order to focus on scalability to speed up adoption.
“We measure success not by transactions per second, but by trust reduced per transaction,” Buterin, Posner and Weiss said.
The reliance on intermediaries was evident firsthand in the Amazon Web Services crash last month. Coinbase’s Base chain lost around 25% throughput when its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline, while Arbitrum and Optimism showed more resilience, staying fully operational with multi-cloud setups.
Several other contributors in 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 isn’t the first manifesto that Buterin has pushed. In December 2023, he advocated for making “Ethereum cypherpunk again” by promoting zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and other encryption solutions that enhance privacy.
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It comes as Ethereum has seen considerable institutional adoption of late, starting with the spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds in July 2023 and, more recently, a rising trend of public companies purchasing the cryptocurrency to strengthen their balance sheets.
However, the Ethereum Foundation and core developers remain focused on delivering on Ethereum’s technical roadmap to make the network as decentralized, self-sovereign and censorship-resistant as possible.
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