Trustless Community Manifesto
December 8th, 2022

DeFi has been captured by the very system we fought to destroy. The values of censorship-resistance, trustlessness, self-sovereignty seem to have been forgotten or just ignored.

Can we, with straight faces, tell new entrants that our new financial system is decentralized, when it is considered “normal” for many protocols to be managed and controlled by multisigs, with no plans to release their power? When the majority of our protocols would collapse in an instant if one or two companies were to fall or turn malicious?

MakerDAO has been captured. It has forgone the ideal of decentralization in favor of peg stability and integration; a large part of DAI is backed by USDC and “real-world assets” custodied by trusted institutions, not to mention the trusted oracles.

Aave has been captured. It relies on Chainlink as its sole oracle - which would only require 16 parties to collude to push invalid prices for the ETH-USD pair, for example. Aave also supports centralized assets which, if frozen by their respective issuers, would leave the protocol in a practically unrecoverable state. We cannot call Aave censorship resistant for these reasons.

Most of “DeFi” has been captured - well, a more adept and truthful term would be on-chain finance. On-chain finance has been described as “money legos” because many protocols depend on and interoperate with each other. This gives us more flexibility but also means a hiccup in one big protocol can spread into a contagion affecting the entire on-chain economy.

It is inevitable that, as on-chain finance grows, this sprawling web of relationships and dependencies will grow as well. This is why we must build our protocols to be able to resist capture. We must also be aware of this web ourselves and treat each new protocol as a potential point of failure.

We, the Trustless community, are building a censorship-resistant stablecoin on zkSync. Our system is a leap forward from all other decentralized stablecoins by removing their one great flaw: the reliance on oracle networks. Instead, we use Uniswap itself as the price oracle, relying only on market forces to provide the true price of Ether.

We are calling all buidlers who care about the values we uphold to join us and build DeFi, with a trustless stablecoin as its foundation.

Onwards.

0xfca5857979902ee83333705e2cbd5431f951f1c0b80e47decda2a2e2e42f6216

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