Trustless Manifesto

The Trustless Manifesto articulates a clear position: blockchain systems should minimize trust assumptions wherever possible and must not rely on opaque intermediaries, unverifiable services, or implicit guarantees. Trust should be replaced by verifiability, and verification should be feasible for end users, not only for specialized infrastructure providers.

Core principles of the manifesto include:

• Do not trust remote services when verification is possible.

• Do not replace cryptographic guarantees with social or institutional trust.

• Verification must be accessible, efficient, and practical for real users and devices.

• Trust assumptions must be explicit, minimal, and auditable.

• Systems should degrade gracefully toward trust, not depend on it by default.

The manifesto highlights a fundamental problem in today’s blockchain ecosystem: while blockchains themselves are designed to be trustless, most applications consume blockchain data through trusted RPC endpoints. This reintroduces centralized trust and undermines the original security model.

Relation to Colibri

Colibri.stateless fully aligns with and strongly supports the Trustless Manifesto. The client architecture is explicitly designed to eliminate implicit trust in remote infrastructure and to replace it with local, cryptographic verification.

Colibri addresses several of the manifesto’s core concerns directly:

• RPC Trust: Colibri does not accept unverified RPC responses. All execution data and consensus information is verified locally using cryptographic proofs.

• Verifiability for End Devices: Colibri enables verification on resource-constrained devices, including mobile, web, and embedded systems. Trustless verification is not limited to full nodes or specialized servers.

• Explicit Trust Boundaries: Where trust cannot be eliminated entirely, such as in pre-final or non-provable data, Colibri makes trust explicit through mechanisms like the Witness Protocol. Trust is never implicit or hidden.

• Graceful Degradation: Colibri degrades toward reduced trust only when proofs are unavailable, and provides a clear upgrade path toward full trustlessness as proof support becomes available.

Statement of Support

Colibri explicitly endorses the Trustless Manifesto. The principles articulated in the manifesto are not treated as aspirational goals but as concrete engineering requirements.

For many of the challenges identified in the manifesto—trusted RPC usage, unverifiable reads, exclusion of low-resource clients—Colibri provides a concrete and deployable solution. Stateless verification, execution and consensus proofs, witness-based fallback mechanisms, and a layered approach to privacy collectively form a practical answer to the call for trustless blockchain interaction.

Colibri is built to operationalize the Trustless Manifesto.