Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has written and endorsed the new “Trustless Manifesto,” which aims to champion essential principles of decentralization and resistance to censorship, urging developers to avoid introducing intermediaries and checkpoints to prioritize adoption.
The Trustless Manifesto, co-authored by Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, asserts that crypto platforms compromise their trustlessness the moment they adopt a hosted node or a centralized relayer. They explain that while this might seem innocuous at first, it quickly becomes a norm, and with every additional checkpoint, the protocol’s permissionless nature diminishes.
“Trustlessness is not a feature to be added later; it is the essence itself,” the members of the Ethereum Foundation declared in the manifesto released on Wednesday. “Without it, everything else—efficiency, UX, scalability—is merely adornment on a delicate foundation.”
“When complexity tempts us towards centralization, we must remind ourselves: every line of convenience code can become a choke point.”
Although the manifesto does not target any specific individual or company, several Ethereum layer 2 solutions have faced backlash for compromising decentralization in favor of scalability to accelerate adoption.
“We assess success not by transactions per second but by the trust reduced per transaction,” remarked Buterin, Posner, and Weiss.
The dependency on intermediaries was clearly illustrated during last month’s Amazon Web Services outage. Coinbase’s Base chain suffered a throughput decline of about 25% when its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline, while both Arbitrum and Optimism maintained full functionality through multi-cloud configurations.
Numerous other contributors within the Ethereum ecosystem have also signed the manifesto, including Ethereum Foundation member Tom Teman and pseudonymous crypto researcher hitas.base.eth.
Buterin also aims to reinforce Ethereum’s cypherpunk ethos
The Trustlessness Manifesto is not the first of its kind from Buterin. In December 2023, he promoted the idea of making “Ethereum cypherpunk again” by advocating for zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and other privacy-enhancing encryption methodologies.
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Ethereum developers focused amid increasing Wall Street interest
Ethereum has witnessed substantial institutional adoption recently, beginning with the launch of spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds in July 2023, followed by a growing trend of public companies acquiring the cryptocurrency to bolster their financial standings.
Nonetheless, the Ethereum Foundation and core developers remain committed to advancing Ethereum’s technical roadmap to ensure the network remains as decentralized, self-sovereign, and censorship-resistant as possible.
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