Vitalik's new declaration goes viral: Blockchain must achieve "de-intermediation", but 99% of projects cannot do it.

The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik, recently signed a “Minimal Trust Declaration”, co-created with Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner. It sounds very official, but the core message can be summed up in one sentence: Encryption systems must be completely based on mathematics and Consensus, and cannot rely on any intermediaries.

What did it specifically say?

The declaration outlines the “Three Nos” principles:

1. No key black box — The protocol cannot rely on the private information of any individual.
2. No necessary intermediaries — Participants can exchange, anyone can enter or exit.
3. No unverifiable results — all state changes must be derivable from public data.

Sounds ideal. But Vitalik also added: Many projects that claim to be 'decentralized' are actually secretly using centralized RPC nodes or private sorting, just like adding saccharin to toxic milk powder. This is not something that can be improved later; it needs to be integrated from the moment of architectural design.

Why suddenly shout this?

Ethereum has maximized its scalability in recent years (recent TPS has hit a new high), but faster speeds often mean that someone has to sort and validate this dirty work. If we centralize this power to a few nodes for efficiency and user experience, then the whole system essentially returns to the old path of “needing to trust a certain institution.”

Vitalik's meaning is clear: efficiency, experience, and scalability are all meaningless if the underlying trust structure is broken; these are castles in the air. This has practical significance for the future Layer 2 design of Ethereum and the diversification of validators.