Ethereum Foundation introduces Trustless Manifesto to push for decentralization in the chain

The manifesto warns that convenience-based centralization threatens Ethereum’s core principles.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled the new ‘Trustless Manifesto’, designed to encourage decentralization, self-control 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 relying on intermediaries.

Hidden centralization risks

The team argues that a protocol begins to compromise its core identity the moment a centralized component, such as a hosted node or a controlled relayer, is used. They explained that while these decisions may seem insignificant at first glance, they gradually form a pattern that undermines permissionless access, at the expense of efficiency and a refined user interface.

“The manifesto is a statement of those values: credible neutrality, self-control, verifiability and resistance to ‘easy’ centralization,” wrote the team via X.

The document defines a system as truly trustworthy only if any honest user can freely join, authenticate and participate without needing permission or fear of interference. This depends on each action being fully verifiable through public data and ensuring that no operator becomes essential to the operation of the system.

The EF also warns that simplicity based 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 convenience code can become a bottleneck,” the authors wrote.

The manifesto points to the increasing use of centralized infrastructure, such as large cloud providers hosting blockchain nodes, as evidence of this slow movement towards dependency. The recent outage at Amazon Web Services has highlighted this risk. Coinbase’s Base chain saw its transaction capacity drop by about 25% when its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline, while Arbitrum and Optimism continued to run smoothly as they leveraged multiple cloud providers.

Blockchains are urged to prioritize trustlessness over transaction volume

This message comes at a time when some Layer 2 networks have been criticized for pursuing rapid scalability at the expense of complete decentralization. Optimism, Arbitrum and Base have drawn attention to risks such as control of one sequencer and delayed decentralization plans due to limited community participation in governance.

You might also like:

The authors propose a new way to assess the long-term health of a blockchain project by how much it reduces the reliance on trust on each transaction, rather than the number of transactions it processes.

Developers who want to make the pledge should do so connect their wallet, read the manifest, click ‘Sign the Trustless Manifesto Pledge’ and confirm the transaction. The initiative has already received support from several Ethereum community figures, including EF member Tom Teman and pseudonymous crypto researcher hitas.base.eth.