Word.ws English Dictionary

trustless

trustless adjective: lacking trust; untrusting.

Adjective

trustless (not comparable)

  1. Lacking trust; untrusting.
  2. Which does not need any trust, or a trusted third party.
    • A trustless network can run even if none of its nodes trusts another.
    • In the trustless cryptocurrency world, you can still trust the cryptocurrency community and its mechanisms to ensure that the blockchain contains an accurate and immutable—unchangeable—record of cryptocurrency transactions.2019, Peter Kent, Tyler Bain, Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 30
  3. (obsolete) Untrustworthy; not deserving to be trusted.
    • But thinks it not that[…]the voice which the spirit uttereth when he is gone from man[…]is a voice proceeding from the spirit which is in earthly, ignorant, and overclouded man; and therefore a trustles and not to be-believed voice?1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 12, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC

Examples of trustless in a sentence

  • If it becomes cheaper to use a TTP to verify the transaction than some cryptographic or other automated mechanism, then the benefit of being “trustless” becomes an illusion.2021, Shin'ichiro Matsuo, Nat Sakimura, editors, Blockchain Gaps: From Myth to Real Life, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 34:
  • And the system would be “trustless” — that is, it would not rely on a trusted party, such as a bank or government, to arbitrate transactions.2022 June 7, Siobhan Roberts, “How ‘Trustless’ Is Bitcoin, Really?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Origin of trustless

From trust + -less.

Words formed from trustless

Questions about trustless

What does trustless mean?
Trustless means lacking trust; untrusting.
How do you use trustless in a sentence?
If it becomes cheaper to use a TTP to verify the transaction than some cryptographic or other automated mechanism, then the benefit of being “trustless” becomes an illusion.
What part of speech is trustless?
Trustless is an adjective.

Words near trustless in the dictionary

  1. trusting someone as far as one could fling a bull by the tail
  2. trusting someone as far as one could spit
  3. trusting someone as far as one could throw them
  4. trustingly
  5. trustingness
  6. trustless
  7. trustlessness
  8. trustlet
  9. trustlets
  10. trustlike
  11. trustman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trustless (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “trustless.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trustless. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.