Vitalik Buterin Pushes for True Decentralization in New “Trustless Manifesto”

• Vitalik Buterin, along with Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, published the “Trustless Manifesto”
• The manifesto warns builders not to sacrifice decentralization for convenience or faster adoption
• It argues that even small steps like using hosted nodes or centralized relayers weaken trustlessness
• The document stresses that trustlessness is the core of crypto, not an optional feature
• The release follows recent debates around layer-2 centralization and outages linked to cloud services
• Ethereum leaders aim to reinforce long-term goals of censorship resistance and self-sovereignty

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has released a new document called the “Trustless Manifesto,” urging the crypto industry to defend decentralization at every level. Co-authored with Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, the manifesto argues that the true spirit of crypto is built on trustless systems — and that this principle must never be traded away for convenience or adoption.

The manifesto warns that many platforms begin to weaken decentralization from the moment they integrate centralized relayers, hosted nodes, or dependency checkpoints. These steps may feel harmless at first, the authors say, but over time they create habits that slowly replace permissionless design with centralized control. According to the document, each additional “checkpoint” chips away at the core values that make blockchain technology resilient and censorship-resistant.

The authors make it clear that trustlessness is not an add-on, nor a feature that can be patched in after scaling is solved. Instead, they describe it as the foundation of the entire ecosystem — claiming that improvements in user experience, efficiency, or scalability are meaningless if the underlying system has become fragile or centralized. The manifesto states that every line of code written for convenience can create future bottlenecks, chokepoints, or single points of failure.

Although the document does not directly criticize any specific project, the message arrives at a time when several Ethereum layer-2 networks have faced growing scrutiny. Critics argue that some L2s have leaned too heavily on centralized infrastructure in order to scale faster, leaving them vulnerable to outages. This became clear during the Amazon Web Services (AWS) crash, which caused Coinbase’s Base chain to lose roughly 25% of its throughput because its sequencer depended on AWS. Other networks like Arbitrum and Optimism, which used multi-cloud setups, remained online.

The manifesto has drawn support from several contributors in the Ethereum community, including Tom Teman from the Ethereum Foundation and the pseudonymous researcher hitas.base.eth, signaling broad alignment across the developer ecosystem.

This push for decentralization aligns with Buterin’s earlier calls to make “Ethereum cypherpunk again,” where he highlighted the need for stronger privacy technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and more secure account models. His consistent message reflects Ethereum’s long-standing mission to remain a self-sovereign, censorship-resistant network, even as institutional interest continues to rise.

Despite Ethereum’s increased adoption through spot ETFs and corporate investments, the manifesto emphasizes that the foundation’s top priority is still the technical roadmap, ensuring Ethereum remains decentralized as it grows. Buterin and his co-authors argue that true long-term success comes not from chasing transaction numbers, but from reducing trust required per transaction — keeping Ethereum aligned with its original purpose.

Final Thought

Vitalik Buterin’s “Trustless Manifesto” serves as a reminder that decentralization is the heart of Ethereum’s identity. As the ecosystem expands and institutions enter the space, the call to protect trustlessness becomes even more important. The document challenges builders to think beyond convenience and short-term adoption, and instead prioritize the values that make blockchain technology worth defending.