trustless

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the Ethereum blockchain needs to better explain its features to users in order to achieve true "trustlessness," which is a common challenge faced by all blockchain protocols. "Trustlessness" means that the protocol can operate without developer oversight, automatically executing rules solely through code. However, if the protocol is too complex for only a few people to participate in its operation, then in practice, others still have to trust that group.Ethereum itself already possesses trustless characteristics, as transactions and smart contracts are executed by open-source code and a decentralized network of validators. Buterin pointed out in a tweet on X on Wednesday that the network still needs to enhance user understanding. "An important but underrated form of trustlessness is increasing the number of people who can truly understand the entire protocol from top to bottom. Ethereum needs to do better in this regard by simplifying the protocol." When asked about the feasibility of this idea in balancing technical features with user understanding, Buterin stated, "We should be willing to reduce some features at times."

According to CoinDesk, the Bitcoin staking project Babylon has partnered with the decentralized lending protocol Aave, allowing Bitcoin to be used as collateral directly without the need for wrapping or centralized custody.In addition to lending services, Babylon is also preparing to expand its treasury design into the DeFi insurance sector, enabling Bitcoin to serve as insurance coverage for collateral against protocol hacks. If no claims occur, the Bitcoin deposited in the insurance pool will generate returns; when a hacking incident occurs, this Bitcoin will provide liquidity for claims. Babylon is collaborating with Aave to combine Babylon's Trustless Vaults with Aave's "hub-and-spoke" architecture.Babylon will build a dedicated Bitcoin-backed "branch" within Aave's lending "hub," allowing users to deposit Bitcoin on its base chain while borrowing stablecoins and other assets in Aave's market. The testing plan is set to launch in early 2026, with the product expected to be released around April.

The Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Jamie Selway, stated at the SIFMA Market Structure Conference that although crypto assets are built on a decentralized mechanism of "trustlessness," their healthy trading still relies on a market structure based on "trust."Selway pointed out that the SEC will promote clear regulatory rules through "Project Crypto" to support competition and innovation, avoiding regulatory distortions of fair market competition. He emphasized that whether new or old market participants, policy-making should treat them fairly, as the market itself is the ultimate arbiter of value.

The Ethereum Foundation posted on the X platform, stating that the account abstraction team, along with Vitalik Buterin, has released the "Trustless Manifesto" and placed it on-chain. The original intention of Ethereum was not to enhance financial efficiency, but to enable people to collaborate without the need for trusted intermediaries. This manifesto clearly articulates a series of related values, including trustless neutrality, self-custody, verifiability, and a resistance to "convenient" centralized models.The manifesto is fully stored on-chain in the form of a smart contract and provides a single operation: pledge(). This contract has no owner, no administrator, and the text is immutable, with all operations relying on the Ethereum network. When the pledge() operation is called, the system will record the caller's address and the timestamp of the first pledge, and emit a public Pledged(address, timestamp) event. This operation only consumes gas fees and does not provide any form of incentives such as airdrops, points, or early access. If relevant parties make a pledge, it indicates their concern for the importance of user self-authorized operations, their desire for their protocols not to rely on private servers and opaque relayers, and their willingness to bear the actual costs to maintain Ethereum's trustless characteristics.

ChainCatcher news, the Uniswap Foundation has granted funding to Brevis to build a trustless Gas Rebate program for integrating Uniswap v4 Hooked pools into a DEX aggregator, with a total rebate amount of up to $9 million.The system utilizes Brevis's ZK Data Coprocessor and Pico zkVM to perform all rebate calculations and cryptographic validations off-chain, achieving a fully verifiable and trustless rebate process without centralized tracking. This solution encourages routers to prioritize the integration of Hook features by providing economic incentives, thereby accelerating the ecological adoption of Uniswap v4 while adhering to the trustless characteristics of DeFi.

ChainCatcher news, the decentralized AI infrastructure Mira Network announced on the X platform that it is building on Base, aiming to address the issue of AI not being trustworthy in large-scale scenarios. Currently, the model's accuracy stagnates at around 75%, with hallucination phenomena, while billions of people are about to rely on AI for important decisions. Mira verifies each piece of information through a consensus mechanism and writes the results on-chain to achieve verifiable AI.Mira Network stated that Base provides the necessary speed, cost efficiency, and security support for verifiable AI: sub-second block times adapt to real-time verification processes, low and predictable fees ensure economic security, and the development environment supports complex logic for large-scale operations. At the same time, Base's community culture and ecosystem (such as Farcaster, Zora) align with Mira's principles of openness and transparency.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos's point on the X platform that "cross-chain interoperability has been solved at the infrastructure level," stating that it is only considered "truly solved" when cross-L2 operations can match the censorship resistance, trustlessness, and non-intermediary nature of native ETH transfers on L1.Vitalik referred to this as the "no-regression principle," emphasizing that new systems must retain the core attributes of the original system; otherwise, they cannot be regarded as sufficiently complete.

ChainCatcher news, Zypher Network has reached a deep cooperation with ElizaOS. The core of this strategic partnership is that Zypher Network will ensure the privacy of AI prompts and the credibility of outputs for AIAgent built on ElizaOS through zkPrompt ("prompt proof") and zkInference ("inference proof"), completely eliminating the risk of data leakage. ElizaOS and Zypher Network will work together to open a new chapter for trustless AI agents. In addition, Zypher Network has contributed plugins for ElizaOS to support wallet management and on-chain queries on the Zytron AI Chain.Zypher Network is a zero-knowledge (ZK) computing layer designed for trustless AI agents and large decentralized applications (DApps), driven by distributed mining, while ElizaOS supports AI innovation with an open operating system. This cooperation not only deepens the technical synergy between the two but also marks a key role of ZK technology in promoting the development of decentralized AI agents.

ChainCatcher news, Polyhedra Network announced the introduction of a completely trustless cross-chain Bitcoin token exchange through zkBridge. The protocol supports completely trustless token transfers between Bitcoin and other networks. For example, it enables Bitcoin L2 and sidechains to securely withdraw BTC to Bitcoin L1.

ChainCatcher news, Bison Labs announced the completion of its Pre-Seed funding round, aiming to pioneer a Trustless and on-chain sovereign Rollup solution for Bitcoin's second-layer network. This round of financing was led by Portal Ventures, with participation from UTXO Fund, Domo (creator of BRC-20), Linus Chuang, Chief Product Officer of Magic Eden, Waterdrip Capital, Bitcoin Startup Labs, Satoshi Lab, and other strategic investors.It is reported that Bison Labs is a sovereign Rollup solution using ZK proofs on Bitcoin, featuring the smallest trust assumptions and the highest security in the market. Unlike existing second-layer solutions, Bison Labs prioritizes a Trustless system that requires no external trust assumptions by protecting assets through client verification and in co-hosted DLCs. This approach ensures security and prevents key leakage.So far, Bison Labs has over 15 teams building ecological applications on its platform and is expanding its support to EVM and Rust0 VM, as well as CairoVM.Bison Labs CEO Jay emphasized the importance of focusing on the native smart contract ecosystem for Bitcoin. Unlike many other second-layer solutions that design generic "multi-signature" methods, Bison introduces a way to protect network security without trust and without the need to create nodes. Bison Labs sets a new security standard through client verification to directly share the security of Bitcoin's first layer.

ChainCatcher news, OKX Ventures announced an investment in the trustless computing platform provider Delphinus Lab. Delphinus Lab aims to build a zkWASM cloud suite and is committed to providing a zkWASM-based application rollup platform, zkWASM Hub, which offers automatic proof and batching services for application workloads through customizable WASM extensions. Furthermore, while continuing to improve and innovate the original implementation of zkWASM, Delphinus Lab will define zkWASM application communication standards within zkWASMHUB to achieve broader interconnectivity and collaboration between Rollup applications on different underlying blockchains.Dora, the founder of OKX Ventures, stated that Delphinus Lab's zkWASM virtual machine is the first zero-knowledge virtual machine to support WASM bytecode, which is an innovative technology that could trigger large-scale applications. By leveraging zkWASM, developers can flexibly use various programming languages to build ZKP applications. Applications can enhance their security and privacy through the combination with zero-knowledge proofs, thereby creating a more decentralized and trustless web3 world.