Trustless doesn’t mean you don’t trust people, it means you no longer rely on centralized authorities to safeguard your digital assets. Trustless systems:
Remove the need for third-party trust
Prevent server exploits and malware
Offer verifiable, permissionless access to financial tools
"A system is trustless when any honest participant can join, verify, and act without permission and without fear.
This requires:
1. Self-sovereignty — each user authorizes their own actions; no one acts on their behalf.
2. Verifiability — anyone can confirm what happened from public data.
3. Censorship resistance — any valid action can be included, within a reasonable timeframe and without undue cost.
4. Walkaway test — if one operator disappears or misbehaves, another can step in without approval.
5. Accessibility — participation must be within reach of ordinary users, not only experts with servers and capital.
6. Transparency of incentives — participants are governed by protocol rules, not private contracts or opaque APIs.
Remove any of these, and the system drifts from protocol to platform — from neutral ground to private property."
(Yoav Weiss, Vitalik Buterin, Marissa Posner, The Trustless Manifesto 2025)
