Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Calls for a Return to Decentralization with the ‘Trustless Manifesto’

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has reignited the decentralization debate with the launch of the “Trustless Manifesto”, a document urging blockchain builders to protect trustlessness as the foundation of Web3.

Co-authored with Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, the manifesto warns developers against sacrificing decentralization for convenience or adoption. The message is clear: once trust is compromised, the system loses its essence.

According to the manifesto, every time a project integrates a centralized node, hosted relayer, or checkpoint, it takes one step away from being truly permissionless.

The manifesto emphasizes that “trustlessness is not a feature you can add later, it’s the foundation itself.”

They argue that modern crypto projects often chase scalability and user-experience improvements while quietly embedding central points of control, undermining what makes blockchain valuable in the first place.

Decentralization vs. Convenience

Many popular Layer-2 solutions on Ethereum have faced criticism for prioritizing scalability over decentralization.
The manifesto points out that even small compromises, such as relying on a single cloud provider, can become choke points in moments of crisis, as seen when Coinbase’s Base chain suffered a slowdown after an AWS outage.

The authors propose a new measure of success: not transactions per second, but trust reduced per transaction.

The Trustless Manifesto arrives at a time when crypto adoption is accelerating, and builders face increasing pressure to deliver faster, more user-friendly platforms.
Buterin and his peers remind the community that the long-term health of Web3 depends on eliminating intermediaries, not adding them.

Projects must find ways to scale while maintaining censorship resistance, transparency, and distributed governance, qualities that define a truly decentralized ecosystem.

This isn’t the first time Vitalik Buterin has advocated for returning to Ethereum’s cypherpunk roots.
He has long emphasized privacy technologies, zero-knowledge proofs, and account abstraction as tools to strengthen user sovereignty.

The Trustless Manifesto is a continuation of that vision, a reminder that while blockchain evolves, its foundation must remain unshakable: decentralization over convenience.

As Web3 moves toward mainstream adoption, Buterin’s message cuts through the noise.
True innovation doesn’t come from centralization disguised as progress, it comes from systems that empower users, not intermediaries.

For developers, investors, and policymakers alike, the Trustless Manifesto isn’t just a document. It’s a reminder that decentralization isn’t optional, it’s the reason crypto exists.