Ethereum News Today: Ethereum's Trustless Stand: Blocking Centralization's Backdoor

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation have released a new "Trustless Manifesto," a document permanently stored on the Ethereum blockchain to reinforce the network's commitment to decentralization amid growing concerns over centralization trends in the ecosystem. The manifesto, authored by Buterin and the Foundation's Account Abstraction team, emphasizes principles such as credible neutrality, self-custody, and verifiability, rejecting prioritization of financial efficiency or convenience. The document is encoded in an ownerless, adminless smart contract, with a single function, `pledge()`, allowing participants to record their support without incentives like airdrops or rewards to reinforce decentralization principles.

The manifesto emerges as Ethereum faces mounting criticism that its infrastructure has drifted toward centralization. Former core developer Péter Szilágyi recently revealed that a small group of insiders effectively controls Ethereum's direction through attention allocation, funding, and protocol decisions, creating a "ruling elite" that undermines decentralization according to reports. The document directly addresses such concerns, warning that convenience-driven shortcuts-such as hosted RPCs, centralized sequencing in rollups, and reliance on cloud providers like AWS-erode trustlessness by creating single points of failure. For instance, a recent AWS outage caused 25% throughput loss on Coinbase's Base chain, while multi-cloud setups kept Arbitrum and Optimism operational.

The manifesto outlines six core requirements for decentralized systems: self-sovereignty, public verifiability, censorship resistance, operator replaceability, accessibility, and transparent incentives. It also establishes three "laws" to prevent centralization: no critical secrets held by single actors, no indispensable intermediaries, and no unverifiable outcomes. The authors argue these rules are "harsh" but necessary to ensure systems remain neutral and accessible to all. The document critiques Ethereum's current reliance on centralized infrastructure, comparing its trajectory to email where spam filters and blocklists have effectively centralized self-hosted server capabilities despite theoretical openness.

Paradigm, a venture capital firm with $12.7 billion in assets, has also drawn scrutiny for its expanding influence over Ethereum. The firm funds critical open-source projects like Reth, hires top researchers, and launched Tempo, a layer-1 blockchain backed by traditional finance giants. Ethereum core developer "Fede's intern" warned that Paradigm's growing involvement poses a "relevant tail risk" to the ecosystem, as corporate incentives may shift priorities away from community-driven decentralization according to reports.

The manifesto's release coincides with broader debates about Ethereum's governance and the role of institutions in staking. With staking-enabled ETFs likely to attract institutional participation, there are concerns about ETH concentration thresholds threatening network security. Solutions like distributed validator technology (DVT) are proposed to mitigate centralization risks by splitting validator duties across multiple nodes.

For Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation, the Trustless Manifesto represents a philosophical recommitment to the blockchain's original vision: enabling coordination without intermediaries. "Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself," the document states, emphasizing that efficiency and scalability are secondary to maintaining a fragile core of trust-free systems. As Ethereum scales, the manifesto serves as both a warning and a roadmap, urging developers to resist convenience-driven compromises that could shift the network from a neutral protocol to a proprietary platform.