ETH Foundation Unveils “Trustless Manifesto” in Bold Declaration
The ETH Foundation, working alongside Vitalik Buterin and the core Account Abstraction team, has released the “Trustless Manifesto” — an on-chain document that reaffirms the protocol’s foundational ethos of minimising reliance on trusted intermediaries. According to published reports, the contract is immutable, has no administrator, and permits only a single operation, pledge(), which logs a user’s address and timestamp to record a personal commitment to ETH’s core values.
In a deliberate move to underscore its credibly neutral architecture, ETH’s manifesto sets out a clear set of principles: verifiability, self-custody, replaceability of intermediaries, and public auditability of state changes. For example, the document outlines three laws: no critical secrets (no part of the protocol depends on hidden information), no indispensable intermediaries (actors should be replaceable and open), and no unverifiable outcomes (every change must be reproducible from public data).
By placing the manifesto itself as a smart contract on the mainnet, ETH has built another layer of credibility around its decentralised infrastructure. Observers note that this is more than symbolic: the contract architecture reinforces that the network’s rules cannot be changed via private governance decisions or opaque processes. When a user calls pledge(), the system emits a publicly visible event Pledged(address, timestamp), and nothing else. This design is intended to ensure that commitment to trustlessness is a personal decision logged on-chain, rather than a marketing slogan.
Manifesto in Context
The release of the Trustless Manifesto arrives at a moment when blockchain projects face increasing regulatory scrutiny, especially those with centralised sequencers, Secret key guardianship, or opaque upgrade mechanisms. By publicly declaring its foundational values, ETH viewks to reinforce its position as a neutral settlement and computation layer — one where users and applications can rely on mathematics, consensus and code rather than opaque intermediaries. This is significant for institutional adoption, as credible neutrality is increasingly viewed as a prerequisite for institutional trust.
What This Means for Stakeholders
For developers and infrastructure providers building on ETH, the manifesto signals that alignment with decentralised, permissionless design remains a strategic imperative. Projects that lean heavily on centralised control or custodial key management may find less natural alignment with ETH’s declared values going forward. For institutional users and regulators, the manifesto offers a clearer lens through which to assess ETH’s value proposition: the ability to build systems where users retain key authority, verifying outcomes independently and reducing counterparty risk.
Looking ahead, the Trustless Manifesto may act as a touchpoint for how upgrades, protocol governance and ecosystem design choices are evaluated. While the manifesto itself does not change protocol code or governance directly, it sets a normative standard. Market participants will be watching how future developments — such as data availability answers, roll-ups, or account abstraction enhancements — adhere to or deviate from this declared trustless baseline.
