In the fast-evolving world of blockchain, where scalability often tempts developers to cut corners, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has issued a stark reminder: true innovation lies in preserving trustlessness. Imagine building a decentralized network only to unwittingly introduce central points of failure—it’s a scenario Buterin and his collaborators aim to prevent through a newly published document that prioritizes core principles over expediency. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, along with Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, has co-authored and signed the “Trustless Manifesto,” a declaration urging blockchain builders to resist the allure of centralized intermediaries in pursuit of broader adoption. Published on November 13, 2025, the manifesto argues that platforms compromise their foundational trustlessness from the outset by integrating hosted nodes or centralized relayers. What starts as a seemingly innocuous convenience can evolve into a habit, gradually eroding the permissionless nature of protocols. “Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the Ethereum Foundation members stated in the document. “Without it, everything else—efficiency, UX, scalability—is decoration on a fragile core.” The manifesto, available at trustlessness.eth.limo, emphasizes measuring success not by transactions per second but by “trust reduced per transaction.” It critiques the incremental centralization that occurs when developers prioritize speed and user experience over decentralization, warning that “every line of convenience code can become a choke point.” This comes amid growing scrutiny of Ethereum’s layer-2 solutions, some of which have faced criticism for favoring scalability at the expense of decentralization to accelerate adoption. The recent Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025 highlighted these vulnerabilities: Coinbase’s Base chain, reliant on an AWS-hosted sequencer, experienced a 25% drop in throughput, while Arbitrum and Optimism maintained full operations through multi-cloud setups, demonstrating greater resilience. Several Ethereum ecosystem contributors have endorsed the manifesto, including Ethereum Foundation member Tom Teman and pseudonymous researcher hitas.base.eth. It builds on Buterin’s earlier advocacy in December 2023, where he called for revitalizing Ethereum’s “cypherpunk” roots through zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and enhanced privacy features. Despite rising institutional interest—such as the approval of spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds in July 2023 and public companies adding ETH to their balance sheets—the Ethereum Foundation and core developers remain committed to a technical roadmap focused on decentralization, self-sovereignty, and censorship resistance. The Ethereum Foundation’s dedication to these ideals underscores a broader societal impact: in an era where blockchain promises financial inclusion and resistance to censorship, any drift toward centralization could undermine trust in the technology itself. As adoption grows, maintaining permissionless access ensures that decentralized networks remain tools for empowerment rather than tools controlled by a few. What could this mean for the future of the field? As Ethereum scales and integrates with traditional finance, will developers heed the manifesto’s call, or will the pressure for mass adoption lead to more compromises?
Vitalik Buterin Pens ‘Trustless Manifesto’ to Safeguard Ethereum’s Decentralization
