Vitalik Buterin publishes Trustless Manifesto

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released a Trustless Manifesto and delivered a pre-recorded closing address at a Dromos Labs event, urging developers to avoid intermediaries and keep protocols trustless as decentralized finance on Ethereum matures.

The document, co-authored with Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, argues that platforms start to erode trustlessness once they rely on hosted nodes or centralized relayers. 

“Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the authors wrote, warning that “every line of convenience code can become a choke point.” The manifesto promotes measuring progress by “trust reduced per transaction,” rather than raw throughput.

Reliance on centralized infrastructure surfaced during a recent Amazon Web Services outage. Coinbase’s Base chain lost around 25% throughput when its AWS-hosted sequencer went offline, while Arbitrum and Optimism stayed fully operational using multi-cloud setups.

In his speech on Dromos Labs event, Buterin also pointed to improving safeguards and broader maturity across DeFi. “DeFi as a form of savings is finally viable,” he noted, forecasting wider use of on-chain finance by individuals and institutions. 

He contrasted current practices with earlier years marked by experimental code and frequent exploits, describing “a night and day difference” in expected security in 2025 compared with 2019 and 2020.

But risks remain. Buterin referenced the multi-million dollar exploit of Balancer, a long-vetted protocol, and observed that recent loss totals were skewed by the large Bybit hack in February (covered in our review article), even as baseline security practices have strengthened.

One safeguard he endorsed is the “walkaway test,” a design principle ensuring users can recover funds without depending on a centralized party. He urged teams to keep Ethereum’s base properties: open source development, open standards, interoperability rather than walled gardens, and censorship resistance.

As we covered previously, Buterin has promoted making Ethereum “cypherpunk again,” pushing zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction and other privacy tools.