Trustless is not the same as trustworthy | Opinion

When Satoshi wrote that “participants can be anonymous,” he also built in the assumption that the rules are enforced by software, not by people. Most of today’s decentralized exchanges keep that promise: once a trade hits the mempool, no custodian can halt or reverse it. Yet, the certainty that a smart contract will execute does not translate into certainty that the overall game is fair. The $ 110 million Mango Markets exploit in October 2022 was executed exactly as the contract allowed; nevertheless, a U.S. jury still found it to be fraudulent this April, underscoring the gap between legal code and moral code.

That gap is widening. In the first quarter of 2022, 97 percent of all stolen crypto came from DeFi protocols, a leap from 30 percent just two years earlier. Even after a 54 percent drop in headline losses last year, users still saw almost $2 billion disappear to hacks, scams, and exploits. We have eliminated trusted intermediaries, but not the need for trust itself.

Anonymity’s hidden tax

Because wallets are free, the reputation in DeFi is cheap. The Sybil problem is no longer academic; entire Telegram channels teach “airdrop farmers” how to spin up hundreds of addresses and recycle the lucky winners. A trader who wipes out today can be back tomorrow under a fresh ENS name, ready to court copy-trading deposits.

Survivorship bias then does the rest. Traditional asset-management studies show that excluding dead funds inflates reported performance by double-digit percentages; in DeFi, the distortion compounds at machine speed because failure leaves no paperwork trail, just a silent wallet. When a leaderboard advertises “200 percent APY,” investors rarely see the denominator: the strategies that imploded on day two and were quietly abandoned.

Attempts to patch this with social graphs or soul-bound tokens help, but without meaningful economic penalties, they simply create new points of friction. The open nature of blockchains means any identity scheme must assume an adversary with infinite wallets and infinite tries. In practice, that makes wallet-level reputation brittle and signals noisily.

Code is law, but data is the loophole

Even perfectly audited contracts can be gamed once economic context enters the picture. The first flash-loan attack on bZx in 2020 showed how a zero-collateral loan could distort an oracle for a single block and siphon six-figure profits. Four years on, oracle manipulation remains a favorite vector, with $403 million lost in forty-one such attacks during 2022 alone.

More subtle forms of manipulation thrive on thin liquidity. Researchers still pick up spoofing and wash-trading patterns on modern perpetual-swap venues, despite automated surveillance. Because these tactics live around the contract rather than inside it, formal verification can’t catch them. The protocol behaves exactly as specified; the price feed, however, has been poisoned.

Designing for credibility, not merely decentralization

So, what would a trustworthy trading protocol look like?

First, it would expose all the data, not just the success stories. Every strategy (profitable, flat, or wrecked) should leave an immutable on-chain scorecard. Second, reputation should cost money. Staking a percentage of notional volume or placing a refundable performance bond forces would-be gurus to internalize downside risk. Finally, identity can remain pseudonymous while still being provable.

Zero-knowledge reputation proofs allow a trader to show “I have three years of verifiably positive PnL” without revealing a name, location, or passport number.

These guardrails carry overhead, just as SOC-2 audits do in SaaS or capital ratios do in banking. But they convert “trust me” into “verify me.” Unlike marketing claims, cryptographic attestations cannot be photoshopped.

My own team has baked these principles into the tooling we ship: immutable performance trails that include the blow-ups, mandatory skin-in-the-game deposits that price reputation, and public proofs of methodology. We regard that friction not as a drawback but as table stakes for capital that comes with fiduciary duty. The pensions and treasuries that will ultimately decide DeFi’s scale cannot defer diligence to a Discord handle with a frog avatar.

Toward evidence-based transparency

Critics argue that these layers re-introduce a form of centralization. Fair enough. But the real question is not decentralization versus control; it is opacity versus evidence. When a protocol advertises itself as “trustless,” the burden is on its architects to show that trust is nevertheless deserved. Failing that, we should expect more headline exploits and more juries asked to decide whether “code is law” absolves economic manipulation.

I remain optimistic. Public ledgers make forensic auditing easier than in any legacy market; the tools are there, and the incentives to use them are growing. What we need is a cultural shift from “built on Ethereum, therefore safe” to “built for adversarial scrutiny, therefore credible.” Until then, the most innovative technology in the world will keep struggling to win the oldest asset in finance: belief.

Nick Gates

Nick Gatesis the co-founder of Rank. Technical founder with a background in growth and product. Built an agency that shipped over 50 client websites and MVPs. Scaled over $10 million in Meta ad spend for clients.