Vitalik Buterin1 months ago
News Editor Vitalik Buterin’s sci-fi novel Snowmoon puts Web3 governance under stress
Vitalik Buterin’s 32-chapter sci-fi novel Snowmoon uses fiction to test ideas that sit at the center of crypto governance: privacy, decentralization, public coordination, and the risk that a society built to resist power can become a new power center after it wins. Buterin says he wrote the main text himself, while Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next were used for spelling, grammar, style checks, rule verification for the game Minpentai and the Dzegoban language, and for HTML, CSS, and SVG handling.
The story spans several political systems, including Veridia, Dzego, the Arctic Empire, Redshire, and Freetown under the United Cities framework. Through devices such as an aesthetic tax, quadratic funding, graph-based public budgeting, zero-knowledge verification, and a digital currency called Zipcoin, the novel examines how institutions try to coordinate complex societies without relying on direct bans or blanket surveillance.
Snowmoon does not present these mechanisms as flawless. The book repeatedly shows how scoring systems can be biased, committees can be captured, and governance can be attacked through human cognition rather than protocol design. Its central question is not how to build a perfect system, but how a free and privacy-preserving society can retain enough capacity to act in crisis without hardening into centralized rule.
