The trust is implied, but not backed by any credentialed certification or impartiality, and is lacking protocols to address the central question concerning "who verifies the verifier?"
The original intent of graders was to safeguard protocols from a vulnerability previously thought to be impossible to address in peer-to-peer trading without some third-party grader acting as a verification checkpoint.
What has happened instead is the confluence of enterprising pursuits which have used every available analog and digital resource to subvert the models of authentication, pricing systems, and exposed their weaknesses to a degree where it has left outdated methods of safeguarding collectors very vulnerable.
Now, more than ever, we need to be aware of what this looks like in our everyday collecting pursuits, in order to circumnavigate the various methods of deception that have been used to resemble previously known and recongized systems of trust.
Those that continue to stick their heads in the sand, ignore, or feel that graders will continue to give them the best chance of protection in this ever changing collecting and trading landscape will eventually find out for themselves they have succumbed to the very spoon-feeding that gave graders the foothold in the market they were able to achieve.
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