The "Trustless Declaration" has been released, and Vitalik Buterin calls for defending the core values of Decentralization.

On November 12, 2025, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, along with several industry leaders, released the “Trustless Declaration,” which systematically elaborates on the urgency and practical path of maintaining the core principle of decentralization in the large-scale application of blockchain. This programmatic document emphasizes that trustless design is the cornerstone of ensuring system correctness and fairness, criticizing the regressive trend of increasing reliance on trusted intermediaries in current infrastructure.

Buterin pointed out during the Dromos Labs event that in 2025, the security of DeFi has seen a “day and night” improvement, decentralized savings are becoming a viable option, and adhering to trustlessness is the key guarantee for the continued prosperity of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Core Values and Design Principles of Trustless Systems

The “Trustless Declaration” clearly states that every system starts with good intentions, but seemingly harmless convenience designs such as custodial nodes and whitelisted relays gradually create dependencies, ultimately transforming gateways into platforms, platforms into landlords, and landlords controlling access permissions and behavioral rules. The only defense is trustless design — the correctness and fairness of the system rely solely on mathematics and consensus, rather than the goodwill of intermediaries.

Trustless System Six Key Elements

Self-sovereignty: Users autonomously authorize actions without the need for others to act on their behalf.

Verifiability: Anyone can confirm occurrences from public data.

Anti-censorship: Any effective action can be included within a reasonable time and cost.

Exit Test: When a single operator disappears or behaves improperly, replacement can occur without approval.

Accessibility: Ordinary users, rather than just experts with servers and capital, are able to participate.

Incentive Transparency: Participants are governed by protocol rules rather than private contracts or opaque APIs.

The declaration emphasizes that trustlessness is not an added feature but an essential attribute of the system. Without this characteristic, efficiency, user experience, and scalability are merely decorations on a fragile core. Trustlessness is also a means to achieve credible neutrality; without it, the system becomes one that relies on intermediaries.

The Fundamental Status and Historical Mission of Ethereum

The declaration clearly chooses Ethereum as the infrastructure for trustless practices, due to its design philosophy that prioritizes verification over blind trust. It ensures that power cannot be hidden behind policies through code, and that freedom does not depend on permission through protocol design. The original intention of creating Ethereum was not to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to empower people — allowing anyone, anywhere to collaborate autonomously without permission and without the need to trust unaccountable parties.

But as Ethereum scales up, this commitment is facing challenges. The declaration warns that trust will not return all at once, but will gradually return through default settings. Each choice feels harmless and temporary - unlike decentralization. There are no captures, no coups - only comfort. Help becomes a habit, habits turn into dependency, and soon participation relies on infrastructure that only a few can operate, with validation becoming the privilege of experts.

Current State of Trust Dependency in the Ecosystem

The erosion of trustlessness is no longer a theoretical risk but a reality. Custodial RPC has become the default choice, and if AWS, GCP, and Cloudflare go down, most applications will also collapse. Many sorters in Rollups are designed to be centralized, upgrade keys still exist, and “training wheels” are used as an excuse for delaying decentralization.

Current Trust Dependency Specific Manifestation

Infrastructure: Mainly relies on centralized cloud services such as AWS, Cloudflare.

Rollup Design: Centralized Operation of Majority Sorters

Cross-chain interoperability: Relayers and parsers become the gatekeepers.

Self-custody: Actual delegation to centralized exchanges

Governance mechanism: Upgrade keys and delayed decentralization arrangements are common.

What is even more concerning is that cross-chain interoperability has begun to reflect the centralized patterns it was supposed to overcome—parsers and relayers have become the gatekeepers of execution, deciding which transactions succeed and which fail. If this trend is not curbed, the access layer of Ethereum may repeat the fate of email protocols: theoretically, anyone can run their own mail server, but in reality, spam filters, block lists, and reputation systems make it nearly impossible for average users to participate.

Trustless Practice Requirements and Costs

The declaration acknowledges that the design of a trustless system requires significant costs. It requires redundancy, openness, and complexity, necessitating a memory pool that anyone can use—even if this incurs spam, and a client that anyone can run—even if few actually do, and governance that progresses slowly—because no one can overturn consensus.

Three core principles form the basis of trustless design: First, no key secrets; no step of the protocol should rely on private information held by a single participant (except for the user themselves); Second, no indispensable intermediaries; any participant involved in forwarding, executing, or certifying must be replaceable by any other participant who follows the same rules; Third, no unverifiable results; every impact on the state must be reproducible and verifiable from public data.

Vitalik Buterin's DeFi Security Assessment and Outlook

At the Dromos Labs event in the same week, Vitalik Buterin gave positive feedback on the progress of DeFi security. He pointed out that the security level in 2025 is a “world of difference” compared to 2020 or 2019, and DeFi as a form of savings has finally become viable. However, he emphasized that it is essential to maintain and improve the core attributes that make Ethereum what it is, including open source, adherence to open standards, building for interoperability rather than walled gardens, and being censorship-resistant.

Buterin particularly advocates the principle of “exit testing” to ensure that users can always recover their funds. This concept is highly consistent with the “exit testing” element in the “Trustless Declaration,” reflecting the consistency of his thought. At the same time, he encourages developers to build with the Ethereum mainnet and broader Layer2 in mind, using the L1 base layer as a liquidity center and L2 to achieve scalability.

Responsibilities of Builders and Path Forward

The declaration places strict requirements on protocol designers, emphasizing that they are managers rather than gatekeepers, and their responsibility is not to build the simplest system, but to maintain an open and self-sovereign system. When complexity tempts us to centralization, it must be remembered that every line of convenient code may become a bottleneck. If simplicity comes from trust, then it is not simplicity but surrender.

Trustless Cost-Benefit Analysis

Costs: computational resources, latency, mental burden

Yield: Resilience, longevity, neutrality, freedom

Incentive Balance: Relying on altruism will decline, while reward control will lead to centralization.

Stable Equilibrium: A Neutrality Profitable System

A feasible incentive mechanism is crucial for trustless systems. The system must reward those who maintain it without turning them into gatekeepers. Protocols relying on unpaid altruism will decay, while protocols that reward control will centralize. The only stable equilibrium is a system where neutrality can be profitable.

Industry Impact and Implementation Challenges

The release of the “Trustless Declaration” comes at a critical juncture for the blockchain industry. As regulatory pressures increase and institutional participation deepens, considerations of convenience often outweigh the principles of decentralization. The signatories of the declaration pledge to build trustless systems even in the face of greater difficulties, paying the costs of openness rather than the convenience of control, and not outsourcing neutrality to anyone who may be bribed, coerced, or shut down.

Implementing trustless design faces multiple challenges, including technical complexity, user experience trade-offs, and business model innovation. However, as Ethereum scalability progresses, the importance of maintaining its core values is becoming increasingly prominent. The declaration reminds the community that success should not be measured by transactions per second, but by the trust reduced per transaction, a standard that may redefine the priorities and development direction of the blockchain industry.