Vitalik Buterin Leads “Trustless Manifesto” to Reinforce Ethereum’s Core Principles

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has co-authored a new document titled the “Trustless Manifesto”, urging the crypto community to stay true to the principles of decentralization and censorship resistance. 

The manifesto, signed by Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, calls on blockchain builders to avoid introducing intermediaries or centralized checkpoints for the sake of convenience or faster adoption.

The authors warn that each shortcut taken in the name of efficiency weakens the very foundation of trustlessness. “Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the manifesto reads. “Without it, everything else — efficiency, UX, scalability — is decoration on a fragile core.”

They caution that even seemingly harmless integrations, such as hosted nodes or centralized relayers, create dependencies that gradually erode permissionlessness. “When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point,” the authors wrote.

Manifesto Calls for Purity in Decentralization

The Trustless Manifesto does not target any specific project or company, but its message resonates amid criticism of certain Ethereum Layer 2 solutions that have prioritized scalability over decentralization. Buterin, Weiss, and Posner emphasized that success in blockchain development should be measured not by transaction speed, but by how much trust is removed from each interaction.

Recent events have highlighted the dangers of overreliance on centralized infrastructure. When AWS suffered an outage last month, Coinbase’s Base chain, which used an AWS-hosted sequencer, experienced a 25% drop in throughput. But, other networks like Arbitrum and Optimism remained fully functional due to their diversified, multi-cloud setups.

Several prominent figures within the Ethereum ecosystem, including Ethereum Foundation member Tom Teman and pseudonymous researcher hitas.base.eth, have also signed the manifesto. This suggests broad community support for maintaining Ethereum’s trust-minimized design.

Buterin’s Push to “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again”

This is not Buterin’s first call to return to Ethereum’s roots. In late 2023, he published another manifesto encouraging developers to “make Ethereum cypherpunk again,” advocating for greater use of zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and privacy-enhancing technologies.

The renewed focus on decentralization comes as Ethereum experiences increasing institutional adoption, following the approval of spot Ether ETFs in mid-2024 and growing interest from public companies adding Ether to their balance sheets.

Despite this influx of Wall Street attention, Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation appear committed to preserving Ethereum’s original vision.