Vitalik Buterin released his first full-length science fiction novel "Snowmoon", with 32 chapters and 100,000 English words written by hand. The founder of Ethereum integrated the concepts of decentralized governance, zero-knowledge proof and cryptography into an imaginary world, and used fictional stories to explore social systems and human nature.
Written by: Xiaobing
On September 27, Vitalik Buterin released his first full-length science fiction novel "Snowmoon" on his personal website. 32 chapters, 103,000 English words, and a Chinese translation of more than 170,000 words. All plots are 100% handwritten. AI only participates in spell checking and formatting. It is open source under the GPL v3 license.
This sounds like a programmer's weekend hobby project.
But after reading the first and last chapters, it becomes clear that the Ethereum co-founder is doing something bolder than writing a blog post: He is taking all of his thinking about decentralized governance, privacy, mechanism design, and pluralism over the past decade and stuffing it into a flesh-and-blood fictional world, and then subjecting those ideas to stress tests in wars, political intrigues, and family dinners.
An everyday world supported by cryptography
The story takes place in an imaginary future where Bitcoin and Ethereum have never appeared, but the operating logic of this world is almost the full development of Ethereum’s vision.
The protagonist Gladias is a citizen of Veridia, a highly developed decentralized governance society.
In the first scene of the novel, he is walking down the streets of the capital, Meldan, when a drone flies overhead. Before he knew what was happening, the zero-knowledge authentication protocol on his watch had completed its verification process, confirming that the drone was a toy and that its navigation algorithm had safety limits and would not come within five meters of a human without permission. His watch knew the drone was not a threat, but otherwise gave away nothing.
This opening is Vitalik’s entire methodology for writing this novel: turning an abstract concept that he discussed repeatedly in his paper (the daily application of zero-knowledge proofs) into a heartwarming scene of a father walking down the street and seeing his child chasing a drone. Technical explanations are embedded in narratives, rather than narratives serving technical explanations.
Veridia's social system is the most carefully constructed part of the novel.
Almost nothing is "forbidden" here, but there is an elaborate system of taxes and subsidies to guide behavior. Buildings are subject to an "aesthetic tax", rated by a quadratic vote of citizens selected by a cryptographic random draw.
If you build a building that everyone thinks is ugly, it won't be demolished, but you will have to pay more taxes. Musical performances are taxed at five levels based on "social impact", ranging from "strongly promoting personal development and civic responsibility" (0% rate) to "strongly promoting violence and hatred" (40% rate).
Managing all this is a decentralized organization called the "Order of Steering".
"Keepers" set tax standards, "Sentinels" audit specific companies, and Gladias is an "Acolyte" in training. If his prediction score is less than 90 points, he will have to wait another year for promotion.
Gladias, who has two biological children, also co-parents their two children with another couple on a semi-annual rotation, part of Veridia's "co-parenting" system. At dinner, the family used a handheld device to order food from an automated food delivery truck called "Dzego Food Truck" and paid with "zipcoins". Each transaction was private by default. Only Gladias and the restaurant knew that an order of 10.5 zipcoin had occurred.
Two narrative lines, the collision of two civilizations
The second clue of the novel begins in Chapter Two.
Zei, a young boy, lives in a country that has been militarily occupied by the "Arctic Empire" for a hundred years. Above ground in Dzego is a corrupt puppet government, but underground is a secret network of education and governance coordinated with cryptography.
Zei takes classes at a "decentralized university" (DU). The location of the classroom was not decrypted from the encrypted broadcast until minutes before class began, the teaching space was covered with anti-signal transmission foil, and students habitually scanned the room with handheld devices to check for unknown electronic devices.
Dzego's survival strategy is encapsulated in a fictional language motto: "Gie fe kiu kai ci bin hu," or "Put your roots down and keep your head hidden." Replace centralized heavy industry with distributed manufacturing, and replace decapitable leaders with cryptographically anonymous coordination.
The climax of Chapter 2 is a bombing. An Arctic Empire bomb collapsed the floor beneath Zei's classroom, killing everyone if the classroom hadn't been temporarily changed. Zei's arm is broken by rubble. At this moment, cryptography is no longer an abstract concept in the classroom, it is the infrastructure that allows Zei to survive.
The two threads gradually converge in the novel. From Veridia, Gladias traveled to Dzego and became an advisor to the Dzego resistance group "Kungaupei". The second half of the story revolves around a larger geopolitical conflict: Veridia and Dzego join forces against the Arctic Empire in an attempt to liberate the occupied Northglade province.
Ending: The Philosophy of Water and Ice
The final chapter of the novel returns to Meldan.
The war is over and the Northglade has been liberated, but the Arctic Empire retains its core territory. On the streets, someone was dismantling surveillance cameras installed during the war; in shops, wartime emergency food was replaced by red flowers celebrating liberation.
Gladias, Seila and Zei meet with Verdow, the politician of Veridia, in the council building. Their dialogue constitutes the real story of the novel, a debate about "what is a good society".
Zei suggests that Veridia's system lacks a key capability: predicting the future. All polls and audits measure public opinion in the moment, but no position requires people to say "if you do X, Y will happen" and then move up or down based on whether the prediction is accurate. He suggested introducing AI, but as a "participant, not the game itself", allowing different people to choose different AIs to assist decision-making, and then be responsible for the results.
Verdow rhetorically asks: Should a society have goals? The Arctic Empire executes its objectives better than anyone. If you build a perfect goal-executing machine, what you get is the Arctic Empire.
Seila responded with a metaphor, using the water of a lake as an analogy. Each water molecule in the lake acts independently, there is no master plan, just trillions of molecules dreaming trillions of dreams. But the lake remains balanced because if the water level is temporarily lower than anywhere else, gravity will draw water over to fill it up. It flows like water in summer and condenses into ice to resist invasion in winter. This is an ideal society.
“Resist the Arctic Empire, but don’t become the Arctic Empire.”
The novel ends with Gladias standing on the roof of the Parliament building with tea and rice, overlooking Meldan. He looked at the tree-covered neighborhoods. Medieval-style towers poked out from the tree canopy. The airplane-like corporate headquarters still stood there abruptly. Only when walking on the ground, the big trees on both sides of the street could cleverly block it.
“Meldan is home.”
When Vitalik stops writing papers
The experience of reading "Snowmoon" has a strange sense of dislocation.
On the one hand, this is obviously a novel written by a programmer.
The emotional dimension of the character is relatively thin, and Gladias is more like a tour guide taking readers through Veridia's institutional design than a literary character growing up in inner struggles. Conversations sometimes read like proposal discussions in a governance forum. The information density of some chapters is so high that one wonders whether Vitalik accidentally pasted a draft of an essay into the novel.
But on the other hand, "Snowmoon" does something that none of Vitalik's blog posts do: it makes those governance mechanisms "alive".
When you read about Gladias standing at a concert, listening to violent lyrics, struggling to rate the band's social impact, and worrying about his own apprenticeship points, you suddenly understand what the superposition of "quadratic voting + graded tax system + reputation system" means. This is no longer a mathematical formula, but an imperfect decision made by a person in a limited time with imperfect information, emotions and biases.
When you read that Zei used information theory to explain the second law of thermodynamics in physics class, and then the classroom was blown up by a bomb, you suddenly understand why cryptography and decentralization are important. In Veridia, they are tools to improve the efficiency of governance; in Dzego, they are necessary to survive oppression. The same technology carries completely different meanings of survival in different power structures.
This is probably why Vitalik chose to write novels. In the paper, you can prove that quadratic voting has optimal preference aggregation properties under Nash equilibrium. But in a novel, you could show a guy giving a violent metal band a neutral rating because of his "primal instincts" and then feel proud of his courage. The former is the mathematical optimum, and the latter is the reality in human nature. A good governance system must accommodate both.
The most profound part of "Snowmoon" is the debate at the end about "should society have goals?" The Arctic Empire is the perfect target execution machine, Verdow said. An ideal society, says Seila, is like water, not like ice. Zei said AI should be participants, not referees.
These conversations read less like science fiction and more like Vitalik’s early response to current AI governance debates. When Sam Altman says "AGI can help humanity achieve common goals," Vitalik's characters are asking a more fundamental question: Do we really know what we want? If desires were written into code and pushed to the extreme, would the result be the Arctic Empire?
Vitalik open sourced the novel under GPL v3. He wrote in the copyright statement: You can adapt it into a movie or animation, but you must open source your production process. This "open source everything" gesture is itself an extension of the novel's theme, that knowledge and creation should flow as freely as the waters of Veridia's lakes.
In the last line of the AI usage statement, he wrote something that is not something a programmer would write:
"Snowmoon was written with love."
Statement of use of "love".
100,000 words, 32 chapters, 4 months, handwritten by one person, telling a story about using cryptography to protect freedom. Perhaps the writing is not exquisite, and the character creation still has a lot of room for growth. But this is perhaps the only work to date that truly and seriously devotes an entire book to answering the question: What would people’s daily lives be like if the vision of Ethereum really came to fruition?
The answer was surprisingly heartwarming. There is no cyberpunk-style cold digital wasteland, just a place with big trees, dinner, and kids chasing drones. A place where ugly buildings won’t be demolished but will cost more in taxes. A place where you can go to a violent metal concert in a purple privacy robe and then go home to Dzego takeaway.
A place worthy of the word "home".