Inside Netflix's New Reality Competition Series 'The Trust: A Game of Greed' — How Does It Work?

Over the years Netflix has become home to a bevy of reality competition series like The Circle, Too Hot to Handle, Squid Game: The Challenge, and more. Ultimately these series showcase the wild things people will (or won’t!) do when a huge sum of money is on the line.

Making its debut on the streaming platform in 2024 is a new Netflix original series dubbed The Trust: A Game of Greed. So, how does The Trust work? We’ve got the details below.

In The Trust: A Game of Greed, a group of strangers is brought together and presented with a quarter of a million dollars ($250,000), aka The Trust. Contestants all start with equal shares of the money, and in an ideal world, they would cooperate and all walk out with the same amount. But during their stay in the villa, they learn about each other’s backgrounds and personalities through a series of tests designed to shake things up.

For example, in Season 1, contestants learn secrets about their peers like someone in the group became a millionaire at age 21, and someone has slept with over 150 people, which may make contestants question whether everyone deserves an equal share of the money.

Unlike most competition series though, eliminations are optional in The Trust. Nobody has to leave the villa.

However, contestants are allowed to anonymously vote each other out of The Trust — which in turn, increases everyone’s individual share of the total prize pot. And get this? It only takes a single vote to boot a player from the competition. However, if no one votes at all, everyone gets to continue living in the luxury villa.

In each round, players gain access to The Vault, where they will be presented with an offer that either benefits them individually or the group as a whole. For example, in Season 1, one offer was presented to contestants where they could either pocket $10,000 for themselves if they vote someone off, or not vote at all and have $2,000 added to the prize pot on their behalf.

Contestants have no obligation to tell any of the contestants what offers they have taken.

In Season 1 of The Trust, there are 11 contestants, and the prize pot — aka The Trust — starts at $250,000. Veteran journalist and former CNN correspondent Brooke Baldwin hosts the competition which has been divided into eight episodes. The first four episodes of The Trust Season 1 drop on Netflix on Jan. 10, 2024. New batches of episodes will air weekly for a three-week event.

Yes, The Trust and Peacock's The Traitors are both reality competition shows that involve deception, intrigue, and manipulation as $250,000 is on the line. However, there are also some key differences between them. Unlike The Trust, The Traitors features a star-studded cast divided into two teams: the Faithfuls and the Traitors.

The Faithfuls must complete missions to earn money for a shared prize pot, while the Traitors must secretly eliminate the Faithfuls one by one. Only one person can win The Traitors, whereas there will always be more than one winner in The Trust.