The Trustless Ideal vs Today’s Crypto Reality
The Trustless Manifesto, published by Vitalik Buterin and his colleagues, couldn’t have arrived at a better moment. Over the past few years, the crypto landscape has shifted so dramatically that features once considered impossible are now treated as perfectly normal. Just look:
- Bybit has released research showing that 16 different blockchains have built-in protocol-level mechanisms for freezing addresses or coins. Early crypto enthusiasts would’ve immediately asked: “Wait, who has the authority to trigger that? Does the blockchain have an administrator?” Today, nobody even blinks. The idea that someone can manage a blockchain is no longer treated as absurd.
- Many financial services proudly advertise themselves as “non-custodial.” Wallets and payment tools (Tangem Pay, Payy Card), exchanges (Paradex, Aster) claim that using their products doesn’t involve custodial storage. But in reality, you’re depositing assets into a smart contract or bridge controlled by the service operator. You don’t actually hold independent control over your funds.
- A perfect example: the POPCAT incident on the Hyperliquid exchange. What did the team do when they discovered an exploit? They shut down the bridge between Hyperliquid and Arbitrum. That instantly left users holding USDC on the Hyperliquid chain - tokens they couldn’t withdraw anywhere to redeem. It doesn’t matter how decentralized a blockchain is. If one of its main assets is a wrapped token that suddenly can’t be unwrapped, the chain loses its meaning. (Yes, of course, you can still swap HyperEVM USDC for any other crypto on rabbit.io - but only as long as the market believes the bridge shutdown is temporary and will be fixed soon.)
In short, give the Trustless Manifesto a read. It’s worth revisiting these principles from time to time, just to keep our bearings straight.
