Who watches the watchmen? Crypto may not be as trustless as it seems

Cryptocurrencies were created as a result of a lack of trust in the legacy financial system, but as crypto continues to evolve and change, more trust is required: in the developers, miners, exchange operators and other network participants.

To some degree, crypto is changing the recipients of trust rather than eliminating the need for it.

Ilya Abugov, lead analyst at DappRadar, told Cointelegraph: "There are still a lot of centralized elements, where users need to trust a particular entity or a group of entities. Even things like delegated voting relies on the delegates acting in the best interest of the community." So, below is an outline of different areas and examples in which crypto perhaps falls short of its promise of "Trustless" technology.

Needless to say, there have been multiple instances in which users would have rather not trusted an exchange - for example, the infamous Mt. Gox collapse, which led to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

While people need to trust exchanges, this trust has become spread thin as the community constantly monitors exchange wallets to keep an eye on suspicious activity.

Wrapped Bitcoin, for example, requires the user to trust the people in charge of minting the token and the custodian that will keep the BTC. While the majority of exchange representatives believe decentralized exchanges will not overtake centralized exchanges in the near future,"Uniswap already has more daily volume than most centralized exchanges," according to Gustave.

Decentralized exchanges allow users to trade cryptocurrencies freely without the need to trust a centralized party to hold their funds and also keep their privacy intact.

Trust is required when interacting both with smart contracts and centralized parts of the cryptosphere such as exchanges.

While in theory crypto can be used by anyone, anywhere, there are multiple restrictions in different countries that can prevent users from using crypto freely.

Most importantly, Bitcoin users don't need to trust anyone with their savings.