On November 13, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin (commonly known as "V God") announced on social media that he has officially signed the "Trustless Manifesto," co-authored by himself, Yoav Weiss, and Marissa Posner.
This manifesto boldly defines what constitutes a truly "trustless" system: any honest participant should be able to join, verify, and act without permission. Its core requirements include self-sovereignty, verifiability, censorship resistance, the Walkaway test, accessibility, and transparent incentives.
01 Manifesto Core: The Three Laws of Trustlessness
The heart of the manifesto can be summarized as the "Three Laws," which provide clear design principles for trustless systems.
First Law: No critical secrets. Protocol steps must not rely on any single actor’s private information, meaning the system’s operation should not depend on the secret knowledge of a select few.
Second Law: No indispensable intermediaries. All participants must be interchangeable and open, breaking the status quo in many systems where centralized intermediaries are irreplaceable.
Third Law: No unverifiable outcomes. All state changes must be reproducible and verifiable from public data, ensuring every operation in the system is transparent and auditable.
02 Design Philosophy: The Necessity of Minimizing Trust
Vitalik emphasizes that trustless design must be embedded from the very beginning of system construction—it cannot be added as an afterthought.
The manifesto points out that relying on intermediaries for convenience (such as custodial RPC or centralized sequencing) leads systems away from the essence of trustlessness.
For Ethereum, the manifesto underscores the importance of maintaining user-initiated actions, verifiability, inclusiveness, and code-driven logic to achieve credible neutrality.
"Trustlessness is not a feature to be bolted on later—it’s foundational," the manifesto states. "Otherwise, efficiency, user experience, and scalability are merely decorations atop a fragile core."
This perspective directly addresses a core issue in many current blockchain projects: despite their distributed appearance, many components still depend on centralized service providers.
03 On-Chain Proof: Permanently Etching the Manifesto
Notably, the manifesto jointly released by the Ethereum Foundation’s Account Abstraction Team and Vitalik has been fully stored on the blockchain as a smart contract.
According to the Ethereum Foundation’s announcement on X, the contract has no owner or administrator, the text cannot be edited, and all operations are entirely dependent on the Ethereum network.
The contract offers a single, simple function: pledge(). When this function is called, the system records the caller’s address and the timestamp of their first commitment, and emits a public Pledged(address, timestamp) event.
This design deliberately avoids any form of economic incentive—the action only consumes Gas fees and does not offer rewards such as airdrops, points, or early access.
04 Market Reaction: Upholding Principles Amid Crypto Volatility
On the day Vitalik signed the Trustless Manifesto, the cryptocurrency market displayed mixed trends.
According to CoinMarketCap data, as of November 13 at 02:00 UTC, Ethereum (ETH) had dipped 0.56% to $3,428.34, while Bitcoin (BTC) fell 1.25% to $101,994.67.
Among major tokens, Decred (DCR) performed strongly, rising 15.26% in 24 hours, while Aerodrome Finance (AERO) saw the largest decline, dropping 15.80%.
| Token | Price (USD) | 24h Change |
|---|---|---|
| BTC | $101,994.67 | -1.25% |
| ETH | $3,428.34 | -0.56% |
| XRP | $2.40 | +0.05% |
| DOGE | $0.1711 | +0.86% |
| SOL | $152.82 | -1.62% |
| DCR | Not specified | +15.26% |
Overview of cryptocurrency prices as of November 13, 2025
This market response shows that even amid price fluctuations, the Ethereum community remains focused on implementing and strengthening its core principles.
05 Historical Roots: From Genesis to Manifesto
Ethereum’s founding vision was never simply to boost financial efficiency, but to enable collaboration without the need for trusted intermediaries.
This philosophy has guided Ethereum’s development from its inception, and the Trustless Manifesto serves as a clear and systematic articulation of that vision.
The manifesto’s explicit values—credible neutrality, self-custody, verifiability, and resistance to "convenient" centralization—embody the core spirit of Ethereum.
Vitalik previously expressed similar concerns in his August 2025 commentary on AI risks, emphasizing that humanity has not done enough to coordinate global values, making it impossible to guarantee that superintelligent AI will serve the interests of all people.
His vigilance regarding the risks of centralized systems is consistent—whether in AI or blockchain.
06 Community Significance: Safeguarding the Foundations of Crypto Culture
The release of the Trustless Manifesto is more than just a technical document—it’s a reaffirmation of the core values of crypto culture.
By requiring signatories to commit to the importance of user self-authorized actions, the manifesto prompts developers, project teams, and community members to clarify whether their technical choices align with their values.
Signatories declare that they do not want their protocols to depend on private servers or opaque relays, and are willing to bear real costs to preserve Ethereum’s trustless characteristics.
This commitment mechanism, together with the manifesto’s on-chain proof, forms a social contract at both the technical and philosophical levels.
Looking Ahead
In the blockchain world, price charts may swing wildly, but the principles advocated by the Trustless Manifesto point toward a future that transcends short-term volatility. In that future, systems do not depend on specific individuals or organizations, but on mathematics and consensus—the direction Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation’s Account Abstraction Team seek to anchor through the manifesto’s on-chain proof.
As more developers and users sign the manifesto on-chain, they are not chasing airdrops or short-term gains, but are casting votes for a new model of system trust—one that relies solely on mathematics and code, without the need for third-party trust.
