Inside ‘Make Trust Irrelevant’: The Open-Source Manifesto Rewriting the Rules of Digital Verification

In a world where data breaches, deepfakes, and institutional failures have eroded public confidence in centralized systems, a new open-source project is making a provocative argument: the solution isn’t to rebuild trust — it’s to engineer systems where trust is no longer required. The project, titled Make Trust Irrelevant, has surfaced on GitHub under the handle Deso-PK, and it represents a growing philosophical and technical movement that seeks to replace human reliance on intermediaries with cryptographic proof, decentralized architecture, and verifiable computation.

The repository, which is publicly accessible on GitHub, lays out a framework that is part technical blueprint, part ideological treatise. It argues that trust — long considered the bedrock of commerce, governance, and social interaction — has become a systemic vulnerability. Rather than patching the institutions that have repeatedly failed to safeguard it, the project proposes a paradigm in which cryptographic verification, transparency, and decentralization make the question of whether to trust someone entirely moot.

The Core Thesis: Trust as a Bug, Not a Feature

At the heart of the Make Trust Irrelevant project is a deceptively simple premise: every time a system requires you to trust a third party, it introduces a point of failure. Whether it’s a bank holding your deposits, a social media platform curating your feed, or a government certifying your identity, the need for trust creates asymmetries of power and information that can be — and routinely are — exploited. The project’s documentation frames this not as a cynical worldview but as an engineering problem with engineering solutions.

The repository outlines several pillars of what it calls a “trust-irrelevant” architecture. These include end-to-end cryptographic verification, where every claim can be independently validated without relying on the authority of the claimant; decentralized consensus mechanisms that eliminate single points of control; open-source transparency that allows anyone to audit the code governing a system; and zero-knowledge proofs that enable verification without disclosure of underlying data. Taken together, these technologies form the backbone of a system where outcomes are guaranteed by mathematics rather than by the goodwill of institutions.

A Movement Born From Repeated Institutional Failures

The timing of the project’s emergence is no accident. The past decade has delivered a relentless drumbeat of trust violations across virtually every sector. The collapse of FTX in 2022 demonstrated how a centralized cryptocurrency exchange could vaporize billions in customer funds while presenting a facade of legitimacy. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how a trusted social platform could become a vector for mass manipulation. Repeated failures in traditional banking — from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank — have underscored the fragility of systems built on the assumption that custodians will act in good faith.

The Make Trust Irrelevant project draws explicitly on the intellectual lineage of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose 2008 white paper proposed “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” But where Bitcoin addressed the narrow problem of peer-to-peer payments, this project aims to generalize the principle across all forms of digital interaction — from identity verification and supply chain management to voting systems and content authentication. The GitHub repository positions itself as a continuation of the cypherpunk tradition, which has long held that privacy and autonomy are best protected not by laws or norms but by cryptographic tools.

Technical Architecture: How You Verify Without Trusting

The technical documentation within the repository details several concrete mechanisms for achieving trust irrelevance. One of the most prominent is the use of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a cryptographic method that allows one party to prove to another that a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. For example, a user could prove they are over 18 without revealing their date of birth, or demonstrate sufficient funds for a transaction without disclosing their account balance.

Another key component is the emphasis on decentralized identity (DID) systems. Traditional identity verification relies on centralized authorities — governments issue passports, banks verify credit histories, universities confer degrees. Each of these creates a dependency on an institution that may be corrupt, incompetent, or compromised. Decentralized identity frameworks, as outlined in the project, allow individuals to hold cryptographically verifiable credentials that can be checked by anyone without contacting the issuing authority. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published standards for decentralized identifiers, and the Make Trust Irrelevant project builds on this foundation while pushing for more aggressive adoption.

The DeSo Connection and Decentralized Social Infrastructure

The project’s GitHub handle, Deso-PK, suggests a connection to the DeSo (Decentralized Social) blockchain, a layer-1 protocol designed specifically for building decentralized social media applications. DeSo, which launched in 2021, was created with the explicit goal of breaking the monopoly that centralized platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram hold over social data. On the DeSo blockchain, user profiles, posts, and social connections are stored on-chain, meaning no single company controls or can censor the data.

This connection is significant because social media has become one of the most contentious arenas in the trust debate. Users of centralized platforms must trust that the platform will not suppress their speech, sell their data to the highest bidder, or manipulate their feeds for commercial or political purposes. A decentralized social protocol eliminates these trust requirements by making the data publicly auditable and the algorithms open-source. The Make Trust Irrelevant project appears to extend this philosophy beyond social media into a comprehensive framework for all digital interactions.

The Broader Ecosystem: From Ethereum to Verifiable Computation

The project does not exist in isolation. It sits within a rapidly maturing ecosystem of technologies and protocols that share its foundational assumptions. Ethereum’s smart contracts, for instance, allow parties to enter into agreements that are automatically executed by code, removing the need to trust that the other party will fulfill their obligations. Chainlink’s oracle networks provide verified real-world data to on-chain applications, reducing reliance on any single data source. Projects like Worldcoin are attempting to create a global proof-of-personhood system using biometric verification and zero-knowledge proofs.

Verifiable computation — the ability to prove that a computation was performed correctly without re-executing it — is another frontier that the Make Trust Irrelevant documentation highlights. This technology has profound implications for cloud computing, where users currently must trust that providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure are executing their code faithfully. With verifiable computation, a user could receive cryptographic proof that the output of a computation is correct, regardless of who performed it or where.

Criticism and the Limits of Trustlessness

Not everyone is convinced that trust can — or should — be made irrelevant. Critics argue that the “trustless” framing is itself misleading. Even in decentralized systems, users must trust the underlying code, the cryptographic assumptions, and the hardware on which the software runs. A bug in a smart contract, as demonstrated by the $60 million DAO hack on Ethereum in 2016, can be just as catastrophic as a corrupt banker. The difference is that there is often no recourse — no customer service line to call, no regulator to petition.

Moreover, some scholars and technologists argue that trust is a feature of human societies, not a bug. Trust enables cooperation, reduces transaction costs, and fosters social cohesion. Replacing it entirely with cryptographic verification could lead to a world that is technically secure but socially atomized — a society of individuals interacting through proofs rather than relationships. The Make Trust Irrelevant project acknowledges some of these critiques in its documentation but argues that the goal is not to eliminate trust from human relationships but to remove it as a requirement from systems where its failure has catastrophic consequences.

Why Industry Insiders Should Pay Attention

For executives, engineers, and policymakers, the Make Trust Irrelevant project is worth watching not because it will single-handedly transform digital infrastructure, but because it crystallizes a set of ideas that are already reshaping industries. Financial institutions are investing heavily in blockchain-based settlement systems. Governments from the European Union to Singapore are exploring decentralized identity frameworks. The U.S. Department of Defense has funded research into zero-knowledge proofs for secure communication. The direction of travel is clear, even if the destination remains uncertain.

The project also raises urgent questions about regulation. If trust in intermediaries is replaced by trust in code, who is accountable when things go wrong? Current regulatory frameworks are built around the assumption that identifiable entities — banks, corporations, governments — bear responsibility for the systems they operate. A fully decentralized, trust-irrelevant system challenges this assumption at its core. Regulators in the United States and Europe are already grappling with these questions in the context of decentralized finance (DeFi), but the implications extend far beyond financial services.

The Road Ahead for Trust-Irrelevant Systems

The Make Trust Irrelevant project, as hosted on GitHub, is still in its early stages. Its documentation is evolving, its community is growing, and its technical proposals are subject to the rigorous scrutiny that open-source development demands. But its central question — whether we can build systems that function correctly regardless of the intentions of their participants — is one of the defining challenges of the digital age.

What makes this project particularly compelling is its refusal to treat trust as sacred. In an era when institutions of every kind are struggling to maintain credibility, the argument that we should stop trying to earn trust and start engineering around it has a certain ruthless logic. Whether this vision is utopian or dystopian depends largely on one’s faith in the ability of code to capture the full complexity of human interaction. But one thing is certain: the conversation about trust — what it means, who deserves it, and whether we can live without it — is only getting louder.