Vitalik Buterin’s Snowmoon opens with a world where technology has already sunk into the plumbing of public life.
An office building shaped like an airplane is charged a 0.59% “aesthetic tax.” A heavy metal band with violent lyrics is not banned, but may be pushed into a higher tax bracket. A toy drone flies overhead, and a passerby’s watch verifies through zero-knowledge proofs that it carries software preventing it from getting too close to people. The watch learns nothing extra about the drone’s model or owner.
That is the frame of Snowmoon, a 32-chapter sci-fi novel in which Buterin says the main body text was written directly by him. On the novel’s homepage, he says Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next were used mainly for spelling, grammar, and style checks, to verify the rules of the game Minpentai and the Dzegoban language, and to handle HTML, CSS, and SVG.
Several societies, several ways to organize the world
On the surface, the book tells the story of how several polities resist the expansion of the Arctic Empire. At a deeper level, it works through a problem that has long occupied Buterin: how a free, distributed, privacy-preserving society can build enough capacity to confront concentrated power without turning into a new version of that power after victory.
The main settings are Veridia, Dzego, the Arctic Empire, Redshire, and Freetown, a city within the United Cities system. They do not sit at the same political level. Veridia and Dzego are states, the Arctic Empire is an expansionist empire, Redshire is an independent political entity later absorbed, and Freetown is a city inside a larger framework.
Veridia values privacy, health, the environment, and social cooperation. It rarely bans behavior outright. Instead, it shifts incentives through taxes, subsidies, and public funding. Sugar policy is a clear example. Veridia does not outlaw sugary drinks, but uses the tax system to shape corporate decisions over time, leading the beverage brand Hydrafill to gradually reformulate its products across 20 years until its lineup is almost sugar-free. Individuals still have a choice, and companies can still sell what they want, but health costs are folded into incentives.
Dzego lives under sustained pressure from the Arctic Empire and distributes education, industry, and security capacity across anonymous networks and underground facilities.
Freetown is more market-driven. It relies on companies, insurance, and commercial contracts to solve problems. That brings a high degree of freedom, but leaves it less able to coordinate resources for public goods such as defense.
The Arctic Empire stresses competition, hierarchy, technological progress, and unified purpose. It moves quickly, but its efficiency comes from concentrated authority and personal obedience.
The book does not flatten these systems into good-versus-evil contrasts. Veridia values cooperation but can be slow. Dzego is hard to decapitate but deeply secretive. Freetown protects individual choice but may lack public capacity. The Arctic Empire is the most efficient of the lot, and also the most likely to turn an entire society into an instrument of its rulers.
Gladias and Zei: rule design versus action under uncertainty
The two main narrative lines follow Gladias and Zei.
Gladias is a citizen of Veridia. At the start of the story, he is an Acolyte in the Order of Steering, the body that designs tax and social incentive rules. Only after four years of experience, a top-10% predictive score, and a parliamentary hearing does he become a full Keeper with the authority to modify tax and social impact rules. His instinct is to think from the standpoint of institutions, fairness, and public welfare.
Zei is a teenager from Dzego and the champion of Minpentai, a complex strategy game. He excels in situations where rules shift suddenly, information is incomplete, and opponents deceive on purpose.
Gladias asks how rules should be designed. Zei asks how to act when the rules keep changing.
After the Arctic Empire absorbs Redshire, Gladias realizes Veridia lacks more than weapons. It also lacks the ability to detect infiltration and move quickly. He travels to Dzego, which has resisted the empire for a long time. Through his partner Seila, a writer who travels and studies other social systems, Gladias meets Zei and Bai, Zei’s friend and Minpentai rival. He is then brought into contact with Kungaupei, the secret network that coordinates underground security, industrial capacity, and external resistance in Dzego. At that point, the two narrative tracks truly merge.
Later, the Arctic Empire invades Northglade in northern Veridia. Gladias uses his knowledge of Veridian politics, courts, and public administration to push military reform. Zei and Kungaupei contribute cryptography, intelligence, and counter-strategy. Those efforts eventually help the more dependable general Lektor take control of the army and lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive.
Gladias stands for rules and legitimacy. Zei stands for forecasting, adaptability, and action. The argument is sharp: rules without action leave a society exposed in crisis; the capacity to win without constraints can turn that same society into another Arctic Empire.
Veridia’s institutional experiments
One of Veridia’s strangest ideas is its public aesthetic tax.
Buildings may be privately owned, but facades occupy public sightlines for years and can impose a public cost. Veridia does not ban a developer from constructing an office tower shaped like an airplane. Instead, a cryptographic system randomly selects citizens to score the building, and those scores become part of its land tax. Buildings judged attractive and compatible with their surroundings may receive tax reductions. Buildings judged ugly pay more.
The novel describes this as a version of quadratic voting, though its mechanics differ from the better-known real-world model in which additional votes become progressively more expensive. Here, the system adjusts each voter’s entire set of scores so that the average score is 0 and the average squared score is 1. That prevents a participant from scoring every building highly or using extreme values everywhere. They must reserve strong preference for the cases they actually care about.
Still, mathematics can organize preferences without making them fair. In Chapter 3, a passerby complains that many people dislike Greater Plum Harbor and deliberately call its walls ugly to drive up its land tax. The point is not subtle. Subjective aesthetic scoring can be warped by social hostility unrelated to the building itself, and can become a tool for exclusion.
Public funding in Veridia runs through several mechanisms. Quadratic Funding increases the relative weight of projects backed by many independent small donors when public matching funds are allocated, reducing the influence of a single large funder.
Graph Funding models part of the public budget as a directed acyclic graph. Money starts in broad fields such as health, then flows step by step into narrower areas such as airborne disease, ventilation, testing, and treatment. A cryptographic network randomly selects a committee for each node, and that committee decides how to weight the flow toward direct child nodes. If a project serves several areas at once, it can receive support along multiple paths.
But the novel refuses to treat these systems as universal fixes. Quadratic Funding can be manipulated by corporations and foreign powers. Expert committees can be captured by interest groups. Project teams can drift into pleasing judges rather than serving their missions. In response, Graph Funding introduces what the book calls “excellent-range randomization.” Once a project reaches the top 10%, it gets the same chance of selection as others in that band, instead of forcing hard distinctions between a score of 91 and a score of 99.
That is a correction to excessive quantification. Metrics can create accountability. False precision can distort behavior just as easily.
Zipcoin as money and as a coordination layer
Zipcoin is the digital currency used widely across the world of Snowmoon.
In Veridia, Gladias uses Zipcoin to pay for meals, pay sales tax, and arrange loans. In Dzego, restaurant payments also use anonymized Zipcoin. In Freetown, shelters quote prices directly in Zipcoin. In Redshire under Arctic occupation, soldiers accept Zipcoin while helping residents hide secret information inside health data for transmission.
The novel does not say who issues Zipcoin, whether it is pegged to any asset, how its supply changes, or what consensus mechanism secures it.
It circulates through digital wallets and cryptographic networks, supporting encrypted transactions, anonymous payments, and social recovery. Gladias’ wallet can be recovered only if 4 of 6 designated friends and relatives sign off.
In one example, Gladias borrows against personal reputation and receives 2,773 Zipcoin. The system generates a zero-knowledge proof confirming that his reputation is sufficient, while a nullifier prevents the same reputation from being pledged more than once. The public network sees only the loan amount and the nullifier, not Gladias’ name or his full reputation record.
Everyday spending is treated the same way. Gladias pays 10.5 Zipcoin at a restaurant. Only he and the restaurant know what he bought. Sales tax is forwarded automatically to the government in real time. The government does not store a population-wide ledger of detailed purchases. It enforces compliance by randomly checking whether merchants use approved transaction types.
Zipcoin can also create what the novel presents as an expensive signal. Someone burns 400 Zipcoin to send a high-priority message to a set of anonymous recipients that meet certain conditions. Burning money does not prove the message is true. It does show that the sender is willing to bear an irreversible cost, which gives recipients a reason to pay closer attention.
That makes Zipcoin more than a payment rail. In the novel, it also becomes infrastructure for coordinating resources, filtering information, and creating credible signals.
After the book was released, the crypto community turned the idea into an Ethereum-based project with the same name, zipcoin (ZC). Project documentation says it was inspired by Snowmoon, has a fixed total supply of 1 billion tokens, and has no official connection to Buterin. As of Sept. 29, 2026, according to the source text, its fully diluted valuation briefly moved above $20 million intraday, while its market capitalization stood at about $15 million.
A zero-knowledge society
Snowmoon treats privacy not as a refusal to prove anything, but as a discipline of proving only what is necessary.
At an event entrance, the machine verifies only that a visitor holds a valid unused ticket, not who the visitor is. A drone proves only that its safety software meets the requirement. A loan system proves only that the borrower has enough reputation at stake, not their full identity.
The Order of Steering follows the same logic. Its members are not selected by a simple lottery. Gladias must complete an apprenticeship, meet predictive performance thresholds, and pass a parliamentary hearing. Once admitted, specific tax-rule keeper roles and corporate audit assignments are distributed through cryptographic randomness. Participants use anonymous discussion channels, anonymous voting systems, and privacy robes that obscure faces, body shape, voice, and gait, reducing the risk of bribery, threats, and targeted lobbying.
But cryptography can protect information without replacing human judgment.
Delwart, a political lobbyist who secretly approaches Gladias, earns trust by talking in the language of freedom, anti-intervention, and anti-war politics. He then plants false clues that lead Gladias to think he represents the social platform Silverchat. Seila later discovers that Delwart tailors a different set of “principles” for each audience: peace for Gladias, broader surveillance for people in environmental data, opposition to civic education for people in education, and little actual support for the openness and interoperability issues Silverchat supposedly cares about.
His target is not the cryptographic protocol. It is the decision-maker’s mind. Governance attacks, in the novel’s telling, do not need to happen in code.
Dzego and the logic of “grow roots, no head”
Dzego’s central slogan is “grow roots, no head.”
“Headless” here does not mean a world without government or leadership. It means that critical systems do not depend on a single public, fixed, irreplaceable control center.
The “roots” include distributed manufacturing, underground facilities, mobile classrooms, and anonymous coordination secured through cryptography. The Arctic Empire can strike one classroom or one large factory. It cannot easily destroy every dispersed node at once. Even if one node goes down, the network keeps running.
The slogan therefore describes not anarchy, but a survival structure designed to avoid single points of failure. The book uses it to show how decentralization can make a society more resilient under war, infiltration, and concentrated power, while leaving open the harder question of how hidden coordination mechanisms are supervised.
Games, entropy, and the politics of scoring
Politics in Snowmoon often appears through games, because games and institutions do the same basic work: they set rules, assign scores, and shift behavior through rewards and penalties.
Minpentai is not just entertainment. It functions as concealed military training in Dzego, building people who can deal with sudden change, incomplete information, limited resources, deception, and teamwork. Dzego hides real defense capacity inside a game, making it harder for the Arctic Empire to identify and destroy it directly. Later, Zei carries that game-trained thinking into war itself, and the line between play and battlefield fades.
The second chapter’s thermodynamics lesson introduces entropy. A teacher uses two containers of gas to explain that once hot and cold gases mix, more information is needed to describe the motion of each molecule accurately, so total unknowns rise. Humans cannot make uncertainty disappear out of nothing. They can only learn what matters most and leave unavoidable uncertainty in details that do not matter. The students can understand thermodynamics without knowing the exact speed of every molecule involved in cooling a projector.
An explosion soon follows, creating literal disorder and turning the classroom lesson into immediate reality. A change of classrooms, anti-wireless materials, and encrypted communication do not erase information. They control who gets access to it. Allies receive the knowledge they need to act, while enemies face greater uncertainty. The novel extends the idea of entropy in narrative terms rather than making a strict physics claim.
Scores are the clearest surface expression of rules. Veridia uses scoring standards, random committees, and predictive rankings in an attempt to reduce personal arbitrariness. The Arctic Empire glorifies individual “intelligence scores.” Dzego, by contrast, introduces a “coordination score” that belongs to the whole community and measures whether people can move away from destructive competition toward better shared outcomes. The distinction is not whether numbers are used. It is what the numbers reward: individual victory or collective cooperation.
The experience of Lily, the daughter of Gladias and Seila, exposes the shared limits of scoring systems and family education. After she receives a score of 59 on an exam, Gladias tells her that scores do not mean everything and that her family will love her unconditionally. None of that is false. It does not answer her need for progress, achievement, and recognition. Imperial propaganda offers a simpler message: love and respect must be won through victory. Lily is drawn into that logic and later leaves home for occupied northern territory.
What pushes her to rethink the empire’s message is another game. Helisport uses multiplicative scoring. If performance across events is multiplied together, a player cannot win by specializing in only one thing; the strongest strategy is balance. Lily extends the idea to life itself: high income means little if there is no time to live. Her teacher in the north cannot refute the point and falls back on authority and punishment. Lily comes to see that the empire’s language of excellence does not always respect ability. At times it simply demands obedience. She eventually leaves and returns to her family.
The novel, then, is not a simple rejection of games, scores, or quantification. Its deeper question is who writes the rules, what the rules reward, and whether people forget the purpose behind a score while trying to maximize it. Good mechanisms can limit power and support cooperation. No elegant metric can substitute for understanding actual human beings.
The novel’s core challenge to Web3 governance
Snowmoon is neither a blockchain manual for statecraft nor a straightforward celebration of techno-utopia. It asks whether institutions, when pressed by bias, infiltration, and war, can still notice their own failures and revise themselves.
The aesthetic tax turns public feeling into a score. Graph Funding turns a complex budget into a graph. Zero-knowledge proofs compress trust into the minimum necessary information. Dzego turns society into a root system that is hard to pull up. Minpentai turns war into rehearsal by way of a game. Each device tries to make a complex world more governable. Each can also be bent by bias, interests, and mistaken goals.
The victory at Northshore does not belong to one mechanism either. The novel makes clear that Redshire has not been recovered. What has been won is the first round, not the war.
The answer Snowmoon offers is not a perfect algorithm. It is a capacity for continuous correction: protect privacy while preserving oversight, diffuse power while retaining the ability to coordinate in crisis, and build the ability to win without using victory as a reason to construct a new center of domination. What deserves defense, in the novel’s terms, is not a set of rules that is always right, but a society that can still rewrite those rules after discovering they have failed.