Ethereum’s Trustless Declaration Defends Decentralization

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation have published a chain-based “Trustless Declaration” to reaffirm decentralization amid growing Wall Street investment. Developers can call a pledge() function—without any reward—as a public endorsement of six core principles: user sovereignty, verifiability, no secret keys, absence of indispensable intermediaries, censorship resistance, accessibility, and transparent incentives. The declaration warns that sacrificing decentralization for efficiency reduces a blockchain to an empty shell. Layer 2 sequencers are highlighted as urgent examples: an AWS outage caused Coinbase Base throughput to drop 25%, exposing single-point failures. The declaration urges adoption of decentralized sequencers and on-chain data availability—citing Arbitrum’s censorship-timeout feature and ongoing tests of tools like FOCIL. It also cautions against “protocol capture” by cloud providers or ETF issuers, stressing that every line of code should be evaluated on whether it preserves user self-sovereignty. This move aims to guide Ethereum’s community through regulatory uncertainties while balancing efficiency and trustlessness.