Vitalik Buterin Calls for a Return to Ethereum’s Roots With the ‘Trustless Manifesto’
Buterin Urges Developers to Protect Ethereum’s Decentralized Vision
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has released a new document titled the “Trustless Manifesto,” co-authored with Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner. The manifesto is a rallying cry to the crypto community — reminding developers that decentralization must never be sacrificed for convenience or adoption.
“Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the authors wrote. “Without it, everything else — efficiency, UX, scalability — is decoration on a fragile core.”
Published on November 11, 2025, at Trustlessness.eth, the document highlights the dangers of allowing centralized elements — such as hosted nodes, cloud relayers, and checkpointed validators — to infiltrate blockchain infrastructure.
“Every Line of Convenience Code Can Become a Choke Point”
The manifesto argues that decentralization is a foundational principle, not a technical afterthought.
When developers rely on centralized components for the sake of speed or usability, they begin to erode the very foundation of trustless systems.
“When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point,” the statement reads.
While the document doesn’t name specific projects, many observers see it as a subtle critique of Ethereum Layer-2 networks that have prioritized scalability — and thus user adoption — at the expense of decentralization.
“We Measure Success by Trust Reduced per Transaction”
In one of its most striking lines, the manifesto redefines how progress in blockchain development should be measured:
“We measure success not by transactions per second, but by trust reduced per transaction,” Buterin, Posner, and Weiss wrote.
That statement challenges the current industry focus on speed and throughput as primary benchmarks, instead advocating for security, autonomy, and resilience as the ultimate goals.
AWS Outage Highlights Centralization Risks
The call for “trustlessness” follows recent real-world examples of centralization risk.
During an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last month, Coinbase’s Base network saw its throughput drop by roughly 25% after its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline.
In contrast, Arbitrum and Optimism maintained full uptime due to their multi-cloud architecture, underscoring the importance of decentralized infrastructure.
Ethereum Developers Double Down on Core Principles
The Trustless Manifesto was also signed by several other key figures in the Ethereum ecosystem, including Tom Teman of the Ethereum Foundation and the pseudonymous researcher hitas.base.eth.
This latest publication echoes themes from Buterin’s “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” essay from December 2023, which called for renewed focus on zero-knowledge proofs, privacy-enhancing tools, and encryption-based design principles.
Balancing Institutional Growth and Decentralized Values
The manifesto arrives at a pivotal time for Ethereum.
Following the approval of spot Ether ETFs in July 2023, institutional interest in ETH has surged. Public companies have begun adding Ether (ETH) — currently trading around $3,480 — to their balance sheets, marking a new phase of mainstream acceptance.
Despite that growth, Ethereum’s core developers remain steadfast in prioritizing decentralization, censorship resistance, and self-sovereignty — the values the Trustless Manifesto seeks to protect.
“As Ethereum scales and institutional adoption accelerates, maintaining trustlessness isn’t just philosophical — it’s existential,” one Ethereum Foundation contributor noted privately.
Conclusion
Vitalik Buterin’s “Trustless Manifesto” serves as a timely reminder of Ethereum’s founding ideals. As the network continues to scale and attract institutional players, Buterin and his co-authors warn against trading trustlessness for convenience.
In their words, trustlessness isn’t an upgrade — it’s the essence of Ethereum itself.
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