Vitalik's New Novel: A Extreme Stress Test for Web3

Vitalik embeds the mechanisms of Web3 into the sci-fi novel "Snowmoon" and tests it through war.

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

An office building, shaped like an airplane, is subjected to a 0.59% "aesthetic tax".

A heavy metal band with lyrics full of violence may not be banned, but could be classified into a higher tax bracket.

A toy drone flies overhead, and pedestrians' watches confirm via zero-knowledge proofs that it is equipped with safety protocols to prevent close proximity. Beyond that, the watch does not obtain any additional information such as the drone's model or owner.

This is the world presented at the beginning of "Snowmoon". Technology is not displayed as a "future wonder" in a showcase but has already sunk into the foundations of tickets, loans, taxes, voting, urban planning, and public health.

"Snowmoon" consists of 32 chapters. Vitalik states at the beginning of the novel that the text is written directly by him; Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next are primarily used for spelling, grammar, and style checks, verifying Minpentai game rules, Dzegoban language, and handling HTML, CSS, and SVG.

On the surface, it tells how several countries resist the expansion of the Arctic Empire. On a deeper level, it discusses a long-standing concern of Vitalik: how a free, decentralized, privacy-protecting society can gain the capacity to act against tyranny without becoming a new tyranny after victory.

Four Societies, Four Ways to Organize the World

The story mainly involves Veridia, Dzego, the Arctic Empire, Redshire, and the city Freetown under the United Cities system. They do not exist at the same political level: Veridia and Dzego are nations, the Arctic Empire is an expansionist empire, Redshire is an independent political entity that was later annexed, and Freetown is a city within the United Cities.

Veridia values privacy, health, environment, and social cooperation. It rarely directly prohibits certain behaviors but prefers to change incentives through taxes, subsidies, and public funding.

Controlling sugar is a typical example: Veridia does not ban the sale of sugary drinks but continuously influences corporate choices through its tax system. The beverage brand Hydrafill has gradually adjusted its formula over 20 years, making its product line almost sugar-free. Individuals still have choices, and companies can continue to sell, but health costs are incorporated into economic incentives.

Dzego has long endured threats from the Arctic Empire, thus decentralizing education, industry, and security capabilities into anonymous networks and underground facilities.

Freetown is more market-oriented, relying on businesses, insurance, and commercial contracts to solve problems, offering high freedom but struggling to coordinate resources for public affairs like national defense.

The Arctic Empire emphasizes competition, hierarchy, technological advancement, and unified goals. It acts swiftly, but its efficiency comes from centralized power and individual obedience.

These societies are not simply good or bad, right or wrong. Veridia values cooperation but may be slow to react; Dzego is hard to "decapitate" but highly secretive; Freetown protects individual choice but may lack public action capability; the Arctic Empire is the most efficient but can easily turn society into a tool of the rulers.

Two Protagonists, Two Ways of Thinking

The novel's two main storylines belong to Gladias and Zei.

Gladias is a citizen of Veridia. At the beginning of the story, he is still an Acolyte of the Order of Steering, responsible for designing tax and social incentive rules; after accumulating four years of experience, entering the top 10% of predictive performance, and passing parliamentary hearings, he becomes a formal Keeper, participating in modifying tax and social impact rules. He is accustomed to thinking about issues from the perspective of systems, fairness, and public interest.

Zei, on the other hand, is a youth from Dzego and a champion of the complex strategy game Minpentai. He excels at finding winning methods in situations where rules suddenly change, information is incomplete, and opponents actively deceive.

Gladias thinks about how to design rules, while Zei thinks about how to act within constantly changing rules.

After the Arctic Empire annexes Redshire, Gladias realizes that Veridia lacks not only weapons but also the ability to identify infiltration and act swiftly. He thus travels to Dzego, which has long resisted the Arctic Empire.

Introduced by his partner Seila, Gladias meets Zei and Bai. Seila is a writer who frequently travels and observes other social systems; Bai is a friend of Zei and a competitor in Minpentai. Gladias subsequently connects with Kungaupei, a secret network responsible for Dzego's underground security, industrial coordination, and external resistance. The two character lines truly converge here.

Later, the Arctic Empire invades Northglade in northern Veridia. Gladias uses his knowledge of Veridia's politics, courts, and public governance to promote military reforms; Zei and Kungaupei provide cryptography, intelligence, and counter-strategy. These efforts ultimately help the more reliable General Lektor take over the military and lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive.

Gladias represents rules and legitimacy, while Zei represents prediction, adaptability, and action capability. A society without action power will fail in a crisis; one with winning capability but no rule constraints may become another Arctic Empire.

Veridia: Writing Value Judgments into Systems

Veridia's most unconventional system is the public aesthetic tax.

Buildings can belong to private owners, but their facades occupy public views for a long time, potentially incurring public costs. Veridia does not prohibit developers from building an office building shaped like an airplane; instead, a cryptographic system randomly selects citizens to rate it, and the ratings are converted into a portion of land tax. Beautiful and environmentally harmonious buildings may receive tax reductions, while those deemed unattractive will incur higher taxes.

The novel refers to this rating system as quadratic voting. Its specific implementation is not entirely the same as the common real-world practice of "the more votes, the higher the cost per square": the system adjusts a voter's entire set of ratings so that the average is 0 and the average of the squares of the ratings is 1. This way, participants cannot give high scores to all buildings or use extreme scores everywhere; they can only reserve limited intensity of preference for truly valued objects.

The problem is that mathematics can only organize preferences and cannot guarantee the fairness of the preferences themselves. In Chapter 3, a passerby complains that many people, due to their dislike for Greater Plum Harbor, deliberately claim its walls are ugly to raise its land tax. This indicates that subjective aesthetic ratings may be influenced by social hostility outside of the architecture, thus becoming a tool for excluding non-mainstream groups.

Veridia's public funds are also allocated through different mechanisms.

Quadratic Funding increases the weight of projects with numerous independent small supporters in public matching donations, reducing the dominance of single large donors. Graph Funding models part of the allocation of public funds as a directed acyclic graph: funds flow from larger areas like health to specific directions like airborne diseases, ventilation, testing, and treatment. The cryptographic network randomly selects committees for each node, which decide the weight of funds flowing to direct sub-nodes; if a project serves multiple areas, it can also receive funds from multiple paths.

However, the novel does not present these mechanisms as universal solutions. Quadratic Funding can be manipulated by corporations and foreign powers, professional committees may be captured by interest groups, and project teams may constantly cater to judges to improve their ratings. Thus, Graph Funding introduces "excellent interval randomization": as long as a project enters the top 10%, it gains the same chance of selection, no longer forcibly distinguishing between scores of 91 and 99.

This is a correction to excessive quantification: indicators can provide accountability, but false precision can distort behavior.

Zipcoin: Currency and Coordination Tool

Zipcoin is the widely used digital currency in the world of "Snowmoon".

In Veridia, Gladias uses Zipcoin to pay for meals, sales taxes, and loans; in Dzego, restaurant payments also use anonymized Zipcoin; in Freetown, shelters are directly priced in Zipcoin; in Redshire, which is occupied by the Arctic Empire, soldiers also collect Zipcoin to help residents hide secret information within health data.

However, the novel does not explain who issues it, whether it is pegged to any asset, how its supply changes, nor does it clarify the underlying consensus mechanism.

Zipcoin circulates through digital wallets and cryptographic networks, supporting encrypted transactions, anonymous payments, and social recovery. Gladias's wallet requires the signatures of four out of six designated friends to recover.

In one case, Gladias borrows 2,773 Zipcoin by mortgaging his personal reputation. The system generates a zero-knowledge proof to confirm that his reputation is sufficient while using a nullifier to prevent the same reputation from being mortgaged multiple times. The public network only sees the loan amount and nullifier, without revealing Gladias's name or complete reputation record.

Daily consumption also protects privacy. Gladias pays 10.5 Zipcoin at a restaurant, with only him and the restaurant knowing the specific consumption details; sales taxes are automatically transferred to the government in real-time. The government does not retain detailed consumption records of the entire population but enforces compliance by randomly checking whether businesses use compliant transaction types.

Zipcoin can also create "expensive signals". Someone destroys 400 Zipcoin to send high-priority messages to a group of anonymous recipients meeting specific conditions. Destroying currency cannot prove the content's authenticity but can demonstrate the sender's willingness to incur irrecoverable costs, making it worth the recipient's attention.

Thus, Zipcoin is not just a payment tool but also the infrastructure for coordinating resources, filtering information, and establishing credible signals in the novel.

After the novel's release, the community turned this setting into a project on Ethereum called zipcoin (ZC). The project documentation clearly states that it is inspired by "Snowmoon", has a fixed total supply of 1 billion coins, and has no official connection to Vitalik. As of the writing on September 29, 2026, its fully diluted valuation once exceeded 20 million USD, and its current market value is around 15 million USD.

Zero-Knowledge Society: Proving Qualifications Without Revealing Oneself

"Snowmoon" understands privacy not as a rejection of proof but as proving only the necessary parts.

When entering a performance, machines only confirm that visitors have a valid and unused ticket without knowing who the ticket holder is; drones only prove that their safety protocols meet requirements without exposing other data; when processing loans, the system only proves that the mortgaged reputation is sufficient without disclosing complete identity.

Order of Steering continues the same logic. However, its members are not simply chosen by lottery: Gladias must complete an apprenticeship, meet predictive performance requirements, and pass a parliamentary hearing; only after becoming a formal member will the specific tax rules' Keeper and corporate audit tasks be randomly assigned through cryptography. Participants use anonymous discussion, voting systems, and privacy robes that can obscure their faces, bodies, voices, and gaits to reduce the risks of bribery, threats, and targeted lobbying.

But cryptography can only protect information, not make judgments for people.

Delwart is a political lobbyist who secretly approaches Gladias. He first gains trust with rhetoric of freedom, anti-intervention, and anti-war, then creates false leads to make Gladias believe he represents the social platform Silverchat.

After an investigation, Seila discovers that Delwart has been speaking different "principles" to different people: advocating peace to Gladias, supporting expanded surveillance to those responsible for environmental data, and opposing civic education to those in the education sector, without genuinely addressing the open and interoperability issues that Silverchat cares about most.

Delwart's attack is not on the cryptographic protocol, but on the cognition of decision-makers. Governance attacks may not necessarily occur in the code; they can also happen in the minds of decision-makers.

Dzego: Spreading Roots, No Head

Dzego's core slogan is "grow roots, no head," which can be interpreted as "spreading roots, no central authority."

The term "no head" does not imply that Dzego lacks a government or leaders, but emphasizes that key systems do not rely on a single, public, fixed, and irreplaceable control center.

"Roots" include distributed manufacturing, underground facilities, classrooms that can be relocated at any time, and anonymous collaboration conducted through cryptography. The Arctic Empire can attack a classroom or a large factory, but it is difficult to destroy all dispersed nodes simultaneously. Even if a certain node is damaged, the entire network can continue to operate.

Thus, this slogan describes not anarchy, but a survival structure that avoids single points of failure. It indicates that decentralization can enhance societal resilience in the face of war, infiltration, and power control, but it does not automatically lead to democracy: how anonymous and covert coordination mechanisms can be supervised remains a question left by the novel.

Games, Entropy, and Scores

The politics in "Snowmoon" often appear in the form of games, as games and institutions do the same thing: setting rules, calculating scores, and then using rewards and punishments to change participants' behavior.

Minpentai is not just entertainment. It is actually a military training hidden within Dzego, designed to cultivate individuals capable of handling sudden changes, incomplete information, resource constraints, enemy deception, and teamwork. Dzego hides real national defense capabilities within games, making it difficult for the Arctic Empire to directly identify and destroy them. Later, Zei applies the mindset formed in competitions to real warfare, blurring the lines between games and battlefields.

The thermodynamics course in the second chapter introduces "entropy." The teacher uses two gas canisters to illustrate: when hot and cold gases mix, people need more information to accurately describe the motion of each molecule, thus increasing the unknown total. One cannot make the unknown disappear; one can only strive to clarify what truly matters, leaving the inevitable uncertainties in trivial details. Students understand thermodynamics but do not need to know the specific speed of each molecule when the projector dissipates heat.

The subsequent explosion literally creates more chaos and suddenly turns classroom theory into reality. Temporary classroom changes, anti-wireless materials, and encrypted communication do not eliminate information but control who holds it: allowing one's own people to gain the knowledge needed for action while confronting the enemy with greater uncertainty. This is a further narrative extension of "entropy" in the novel, rather than a strict conclusion of physics.

"Scores" are the most intuitive representation of rules. Veridia hopes to reduce individual arbitrariness with scoring standards, random committees, and predictive performance; the Arctic Empire worships individual "intelligence scores"; while Dzego's proposed "coordination score" belongs to the entire community, measuring whether people can escape vicious competition and collectively turn towards better choices. The distinction among the three lies not in the use of numbers but in whether they reward individual victory or collective cooperation.

The experiences of Gladias and Seila's daughter, Lily, reveal the common limitations of scoring systems and family education. When she scores only 59 points on an exam, Gladias tells her that "scores do not represent everything" and emphasizes that family will love her unconditionally. These words are not wrong, but they do not address her needs for progress, achievement, and recognition. The propaganda of the Arctic Empire conveniently provides a simple answer: love and respect must be earned through victory. As a result, Lily is exposed to imperial propaganda for a long time and even leaves home to go to the Arctic occupied area.

However, it is still a game that prompts Lily to rethink. Helisport uses multiplicative scoring: if the scores of different events are multiplied, specializing in one cannot lead to victory; the most effective strategy is to maintain balance. Lily further points out that work and life are the same—no matter how high the income, if there is no time to live, everything gained loses its meaning. Arctic teachers cannot refute her and can only rely on authority to punish her. Lily thus discovers that the "pursuit of excellence" spoken of by the Empire does not always respect ability; sometimes it merely demands obedience. She then decides to leave and ultimately returns to her family.

Therefore, the novel does not simply oppose games, scores, or quantification mechanisms. What it truly questions is: who sets the rules, what do the rules reward, and whether people will forget the original goals of the scores in their pursuit of winning them. Good mechanisms can limit power and promote cooperation; however, no matter how sophisticated the numbers are, they cannot replace the understanding of specific individuals.

Conclusion

"Snowmoon" is not a manual for blockchain governance, nor is it a mere praise of technological utopia, but rather a reflection on whether institutions still have the capacity to identify errors and change themselves in the face of prejudice, infiltration, and war.

Aesthetic taxes turn public feelings into scores, Graph Funding transforms complex budgets into graphs, zero-knowledge proofs compress trust into necessary information, Dzego organizes society into difficult-to-remove roots, and Minpentai rehearses war as a game. They all attempt to make the complex world coordinable, but they can also be distorted by prejudice, interests, and erroneous goals.

The victory of Northshore does not belong to any one mechanism either. Redshire has not yet been reclaimed, and the novel clearly reminds readers: they have only won the first round, not the war.

Thus, the answer given by "Snowmoon" is not a perfect algorithm but a capacity for continuous error correction: protecting privacy while retaining oversight; decentralizing power while enabling coordinated action in crises; having the ability to win without turning victory into a reason for establishing new powers. What is truly worth defending is not the eternally correct rules, but the ability of society to collectively modify them even after discovering that the rules have become ineffective.