Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has written and signed the brand new “Manifesto Without Trust,” which goals to uphold the core values of decentralization and resistance to censorship and urge builders to leave the addition of intermediaries and checkpoints for the sake of acceptance.
The “Trustless Manifesto,” also written by Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, says crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the moment they integrate a hosted node or centralized relayer — explaining that while it could feel harmless, it becomes habitual and the protocol becomes less permissionless with each checkpoint passed.
“Trustlessness isn’t a feature to be added as an afterthought. It is the thing itself,” Ethereum Foundation members said within the manifesto released Wednesday. “Without it, all the things else – efficiency, UX, scalability – is decoration on a fragile core.”
“If complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: Every line of convenience code can turn into a bottleneck.”Excerpt from the “Trustless Manifesto”. Source: Trustlessness.eth
While the manifesto was not aimed toward any specific individual or company, some Ethereum Layer 2 firms have dismissed criticism for sacrificing decentralization to give attention to scalability to speed up adoption.
“We don’t measure success by transactions per second, but somewhat by the lack of trust per transaction,” said Buterin, Posner and Weiss.
The reliance on intermediaries was evident firsthand in last month's crash of Amazon Web Services. Coinbase's Base chain lost about 25% of throughput when the AWS-hosted sequencer went offline, while Arbitrum and Optimism showed greater resilience and remained fully functional with multi-cloud setups.
Several other contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem have signed the manifesto, including Ethereum Foundation member Tom Teman and pseudonymous crypto researcher hitas.base.eth.
Buterin also desires to make Ethereum more cypherpunk
The Trustlessness Manifesto isn’t the primary manifesto that Buterin has pushed. In December 2023, he advocated “making Ethereum cypherpunk again” by promoting zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and other encryption solutions that improve privacy.
Ethereum developers have jumped in amid rising interest from Wall Street
This is because Ethereum has seen significant institutional adoption recently, starting with spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds in July 2023 and more recently with a growing trend of public firms purchasing the cryptocurrency to bolster their balance sheets.
However, the Ethereum Foundation and core developers remain focused on implementing Ethereum's technical roadmap to make the network as decentralized, self-sovereign and censorship-resistant as possible.
