A massive Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025, disrupted nearly 20% of global internet traffic, knocking offline major platforms like X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and several crypto services, including Coinbase, Kraken, Aave, DeFiLlama, and Etherscan. While underlying blockchains like Ethereum continued producing blocks, users couldn’t access wallets or execute transactions due to centralized infrastructure failures. This incident, following an AWS outage in October 2025 that hit Coinbase and Robinhood, exposed a critical flaw: crypto protocols have decentralized their cores but remain chained to centralized “conveniences” like cloud providers and RPC endpoints. Industry voices, including EthStorage and Filecoin, argue that true resilience demands full end-to-end decentralization across the entire tech stack—from frontend and storage to DNS and APIs—to eliminate single points of failure.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, alongside Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, published the “Trustless Manifesto” on November 11, 2025, etched on-chain at trustlessness.eth.limo. This pledge warns that “trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact” but the “thing itself,” urging builders to measure success by trust reduced per transaction, not throughput. Buterin emphasizes resisting “convenient” centralization, like hosted nodes or relayers, which create chokepoints. The manifesto outlines three laws: no critical secrets, no indispensable intermediaries, and no unverifiable outcomes. Signed by Buterin and others via an on-chain contract (0x32aa964746ba2be65c71fe4a5cb3c4a023ca3e20), it calls for self-sovereignty and transparent incentives, countering criticisms of Ethereum’s L2 fragmentation. As Buterin stated on X, “Gateways become platforms. Platforms become landlords,” highlighting how centralization erodes permissionless access.
Achieving full decentralization across frontend, storage, DNS, APIs, and network access isn’t an overnight overhaul—it’s a strategic migration. EthStorage advocates planning roadmaps to phase out centralized dependencies, ensuring security without delaying launches. Projects like IPFS, Filecoin, and Arweave are leading with distributed storage, reducing reliance on providers like Cloudflare or AWS. For instance, IPFS enables censorship-resistant data sharing, while Filecoin incentivizes node operators for resilient archiving. During the outage, DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) projects like Theta Fuel surged, proving redundancy’s value. Experts recommend starting with hybrid models: decentralize non-critical layers first, then scale to core components. This pragmatic approach aligns with Buterin’s vision, fostering long-term robustness without sacrificing user growth.
Centralization creeps in subtly—spam filters on email or hosted RPCs on Ethereum—but it transforms neutral protocols into gated platforms. The Cloudflare outage disrupted 20% of crypto front-ends, from BitMEX to Toncoin, while on-chain activity persisted, underscoring the “bootstrap trap”: new chains bootstrap on centralized infra for speed, only to become dependent. DePIN solutions, like Lava Network’s merit-based RPCs or Pocket Network’s Shannon Upgrade, offer alternatives, routing traffic via decentralized nodes for 99.9% uptime. Buterin’s manifesto stresses that without end-to-end trustlessness, systems risk censorship, as seen in AWS’s October failure affecting 37% of Ethereum nodes. For investors, this means prioritizing protocols with verifiable, intermediary-free designs to mitigate outage risks.
The Trustless Manifesto invites developers to sign its on-chain pledge, logging commitments on Ethereum mainnet for public accountability. As Buterin notes, success metrics should prioritize reduced trust, not TPS, ensuring systems remain verifiable and replaceable. For protocols, this means auditing for hidden intermediaries and integrating DePIN tools early. Investors can track adoption via DefiLlama for TVL shifts and Nansen for whale moves toward decentralized infra. With Ethereum‘s L2s facing sequencer centralization critiques, full-stack decentralization could unlock $1T in resilient capital by 2030. As outages like Cloudflare remind us, crypto’s promise of permissionless finance demands vigilance—decentralize the stack, or risk becoming the next landlord.
