Vitalik Buterin's new book, Snowmoon, explores zero-knowledge proofs, privacy societies, and crypto governance. The book constructs four distinct social models, taking aesthetic taxes, Zipcoin currency, and decentralized decision-making as examples, to discuss how free societies respond to power.
Written by KarenZ, Foresight News
An office building was levied a 0.59% "aesthetic tax" because its shape resembles an airplane.
A heavy metal band whose lyrics are full of violence will not be banned, but may be placed in a higher tax bracket.
When a toy drone flies overhead, a pedestrian's watch will confirm through zero-knowledge proof that it has safety programs to prevent it from getting too close to people. Beyond that, the watch will not obtain extra information such as the drone's model or owner.
This is the world shown at the beginning of Snowmoon. Technology is not placed in a display window as a "wonder of the future," but has already sunk into the underlying layers of tickets, loans, taxes, voting, urban planning, and public health.
Snowmoon has 32 chapters in total. On the first page of the novel, Vitalik states that he directly wrote all the main text; Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next were mainly used for spelling, grammar, and style checking, verifying the rules of the Minpentai game and the Dzegoban language, and handling HTML, CSS, and SVG.
On the surface, it tells how several countries resist the expansion of the Arctic Empire. At a deeper level, it discusses a question Vitalik has long cared about: how can a free, decentralized, privacy-protecting society obtain the capacity for action needed to resist powerful forces, without becoming a new powerful force after victory?
Four societies, four ways of organizing the world
The story mainly involves Veridia, Dzego, the Arctic Empire, Redshire, and the city of Freetown under the United Cities system. They are not at exactly the same political level: Veridia and Dzego are countries, the Arctic Empire is an expansionist empire, Redshire is an independent political entity later annexed, and Freetown is a city within the United Cities.
Veridia values privacy, health, the environment, and social cooperation. It rarely directly prohibits a certain behavior, and prefers to change incentives through taxes, subsidies, and public funding.
Sugar control is a typical example: Veridia did not ban the sale of sugary drinks, but continuously influenced corporate choices through the tax system. The beverage brand Hydrafill therefore 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 the threat of the Arctic Empire, so it disperses education, industry, and security capabilities into anonymous networks and underground facilities.
Freetown is more market-oriented, relying on enterprises, insurance, and commercial contracts to solve problems. It has a high degree of freedom, but it is not easy to coordinate resources for public affairs such as national defense.
The Arctic Empire emphasizes competition, hierarchy, technological progress, and unified goals. It acts quickly, but its efficiency comes from concentrated power and individual obedience.
These societies are not simply a contrast of good and bad, good and evil. Veridia values cooperation, but may respond slowly; Dzego is difficult to "decapitate," but is highly secretive; Freetown protects individual choice, but may lack public action capacity; the Arctic Empire is the most efficient, and also the most likely to turn the entire society into a tool of the ruler.
Two protagonists, two ways of thinking
The novel's two main lines belong to Gladias and Zei.
Gladias is a citizen of Veridia. At the beginning of the story, he is still an Acolyte, that is, a trainee member, of the Order of Steering responsible for designing tax and social incentive rules; only after accumulating four years of experience, entering the top 10% of predictive scores, and passing a parliamentary hearing does he become a formal Keeper and participate in modifying tax and social impact rules. He is accustomed to thinking from the perspective of institutions, fairness, and the public interest.
Zei is a Dzego youth and a champion of the complex strategy game Minpentai. He is good at finding ways to win when 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 what Veridia lacks is not only weapons, but also the ability to identify infiltration and act quickly. He therefore travels to Dzego, which has long resisted the Arctic Empire.
Through his partner Seila, Gladias meets Zei and Bai. Seila is a writer who frequently travels and observes other social systems; Bai is Zei's friend and Minpentai rival. Gladias then comes into contact with Kungaupei—the secret network responsible for Dzego's underground security, industrial coordination, and external resistance. The two character lines truly converge at this point.
Later, the Arctic Empire invades Northglade in northern Veridia. Gladias uses his knowledge of Veridia's politics, courts, and public governance to promote military reform; Zei and Kungaupei provide cryptography, intelligence, and confrontation strategies. These efforts ultimately help the more reliable general Lektor take over the army and lay the foundation for a counteroffensive.
Gladias represents rules and legitimacy, while Zei represents prediction, adaptability, and the capacity for action. With only rules and no capacity for action, a society will fall in a crisis; with only the ability to win and no restraint by rules, it may become another Arctic Empire.
Veridia: Writing value judgments into institutions
Veridia's most unusual institution is the public aesthetic tax.
Buildings can be privately owned, but facades occupy the public view for long periods, and therefore may create public costs. Veridia does not prohibit developers from building an office building that looks like an airplane, but instead uses a cryptographic system to randomly select citizens to rate it, and then converts the ratings into part of the land tax. Beautiful buildings that harmonize with the environment may receive tax reductions, while buildings considered ugly must pay more tax.
The novel calls this rating system quadratic voting. Its specific implementation is not exactly the same as the common real-world version in which "the more votes, the more costs grow quadratically": the system adjusts a voter's entire set of ratings so that their average is 0 and the average of the squared ratings is 1. In this way, participants cannot give high scores to all buildings, nor can they use extreme scores everywhere, and can only reserve their limited intensity of preference for the objects they truly value.
The problem is that mathematics can only organize preferences, not guarantee that the preferences themselves are fair. In Chapter 3, a passerby complains that many people, because they hate Greater Plum Harbor, deliberately claim that its walls are ugly in order to drive up its land tax. This shows that subjective aesthetic ratings may be influenced by social hostility beyond architecture, and thus become a tool for excluding non-mainstream groups.
Veridia's public funds are also allocated through different mechanisms.
Quadratic Funding relatively increases the weight in public matching funds of projects with many independent small donors, and reduces the dominance of a single large donor. Graph Funding, by contrast, models the allocation of part of public funds as a directed acyclic graph: funds flow level by level from larger domains such as health to specific directions such as airborne diseases, ventilation, testing, and treatment. A cryptographic network randomly selects a committee for each node, and the committee decides the weights of fund flows to direct child nodes; if a project serves multiple domains at the same time, it can also receive funding from multiple paths.
But the novel does not write these mechanisms as universal answers. Quadratic Funding can be manipulated by corporations and foreign forces, professional committees may be captured by interest groups, and project teams may constantly cater to judges for ratings. Graph Funding therefore introduces "randomization within the excellent range": as long as a project enters the top 10%, it receives the same chance of selection, and no longer forcibly distinguishes between 91 points and 99 points.
This is a correction to over-quantification: metrics can provide accountability, but false precision also distorts behavior.
Zipcoin is both currency and coordination tool
Zipcoin is the digital currency widely used in the world of the Snowmoon novel.
In Veridia, Gladias uses Zipcoin to pay for meals, pay sales tax, and handle loans; in Dzego, restaurant payments also use anonymized Zipcoin; in Freetown, shelters directly price in Zipcoin; and in Redshire, occupied by the Arctic Empire, there are also soldiers who collect Zipcoin, helping residents hide secret information in health data and transmit it out.However, the novel does not explain who issues it, whether it is pegged to some asset, how its supply changes, or what its underlying consensus mechanism is.
Zipcoin circulates through digital wallets and a cryptographic network, and supports encrypted transactions, anonymous payments, and social recovery. Gladias's wallet requires four of six designated friends and relatives to co-sign before it can be recovered.
In one case, Gladias borrows 2,773 Zipcoin using his personal reputation as collateral. The system generates a zero-knowledge proof confirming that his reputation is sufficient, while using a nullifier to prevent the same reputation from being pledged twice. The public network sees only the loan amount and the nullifier, not Gladias's name or full reputation record.
Everyday spending is similarly privacy-protected. Gladias pays 10.5 Zipcoin at a restaurant, and only he and the restaurant know the specific details of the purchase; sales tax is automatically transferred to the government in real time. The government does not keep a detailed record of everyone's consumption, but instead enforces the law by randomly checking whether merchants use compliant transaction types.
Zipcoin can also create "expensive signals." Someone destroys 400 Zipcoin to send a high-priority message to a group of anonymous recipients who meet certain criteria. Destroying currency cannot prove that the content is true, but it can prove that the sender is willing to bear an unrecoverable cost, making it worth the recipient's attention.
Zipcoin is therefore not just a payment tool, but also infrastructure in the novel for coordinating resources, filtering information, and establishing credible signals.
After the novel was published, the community turned this setting into an Ethereum project of the same name, zipcoin (ZC). The project documentation clearly states that it was inspired by Snowmoon, has a fixed total supply of 1 billion coins, and has no official association with Vitalik. As of the time of writing on September 29, 2026, its fully diluted valuation briefly exceeded $20 million intraday, and its current market capitalization is around $15 million.
The Zero-Knowledge Society: Prove Eligibility Without Giving Up Yourself
Snowmoon's understanding of privacy is not a rejection of proof, but proving only what is necessary.
When entering a performance, the machine only confirms that the visitor holds a valid and unused ticket, without knowing who the ticket holder is; a drone only proves that its safety procedures meet requirements, without exposing other data; when taking out a loan, the system only proves that the pledged reputation is sufficient, without disclosing full identity.
The Order of Steering continues the same logic. However, its members are not simply selected by lot: Gladias must complete an apprenticeship, meet predictive performance requirements, and pass a council hearing; only after becoming a full member are specific tax-rule Keeper duties and corporate audit tasks randomly assigned through cryptography. Participants use anonymous discussion, voting systems, and privacy robes capable of obscuring face, body shape, voice, and gait, in order to reduce the risks of bribery, threats, and targeted lobbying.
But cryptography can only protect information; it cannot make judgments for people.
Delwart is a political lobbyist who secretly approaches Gladias. He first gains trust by using the language of freedom, anti-intervention, and anti-war sentiment, then creates false clues so that Gladias mistakenly believes he represents the social platform Silverchat.
After investigating, Seila discovers that Delwart has been telling different "principles" to different people: talking about peace with Gladias, supporting expanded surveillance with the person responsible for environmental data, opposing civic education with people in the education field, yet never truly helping with the openness and interoperability issues Silverchat cares about most.
What Delwart attacks is not the cryptographic protocol, but the cognition of decision-makers. Governance attacks do not necessarily happen in code; they can also happen in the minds of decision-makers.
Dzego: Grow Roots, No Head
Dzego's core slogan is "grow roots, no head," which can be translated as "spread roots everywhere, establish no center."
The "headless" here does not mean that Dzego has no government or leaders, but rather emphasizes that key systems do not depend on a public, fixed, and irreplaceable control center.
The "roots" include distributed manufacturing, underground facilities, classrooms that can relocate at any time, and anonymous collaboration conducted through cryptography. The Arctic Empire can attack a classroom or a large factory, but it is very difficult to destroy all dispersed nodes at the same time. Even if a node is damaged, the entire network can continue to operate.
Therefore, this slogan does not describe anarchy, but a survival structure that avoids single points of failure. It shows that decentralization can increase a society's resilience in the face of war, infiltration, and power control, but it does not automatically bring democracy: how anonymous and concealed coordination mechanisms accept oversight remains a question left by the novel.
Games, Entropy, and Scores
Politics in Snowmoon often appears in the form of games, because games and institutions do the same thing: set rules, calculate scores, and then use rewards and punishments to change participants' behavior.
Minpentai is also not merely entertainment. It is in fact military training hidden by Dzego, used to cultivate people capable of handling sudden changes, incomplete information, resource constraints, enemy deception, and teamwork. Dzego hides real national defense capabilities inside games, making it difficult for the Arctic Empire to directly identify and destroy them. Later, Zei applies the thinking formed in competition to real war, and the boundary between games and the battlefield disappears.
The thermodynamics lesson in Chapter 2 introduces "entropy." The teacher uses two containers of gas to explain: after hot and cold gases mix, people need more information to accurately describe the motion of each molecule, so the total amount of the unknown increases. People cannot make the unknown disappear out of thin air; they can only try to understand what truly matters and leave unavoidable uncertainty in irrelevant details. Students understand thermodynamics, but they do not need to know the specific speed of every molecule when the projector dissipates heat.
The subsequent explosion literally creates more chaos and suddenly turns classroom theory into reality. Temporarily changing classrooms, anti-wireless materials, and encrypted communications do not eliminate information, but control whose hands information falls into: allowing one's own people to gain the knowledge needed for action, while confronting the enemy with more uncertainty. This is the novel's further narrative extension of "entropy," not a strict physics conclusion.
"Scores" are the most intuitive expression of rules. Veridia hopes to use scoring standards, random committees, and predictive performance to reduce personal arbitrariness; the Arctic Empire worships the individual's "intelligence score"; the "coordination score" proposed by Dzego belongs to the entire community, measuring whether people can escape vicious competition and collectively turn toward better choices. The difference among the three lies not in whether numbers are used, but in whether they reward individual victory or collective cooperation.
The experience of Gladias and Seila's daughter Lily reveals the shared limitations of scoring systems and family education. When she scores only 59 on an exam, Gladias tells her that "scores are not everything" and emphasizes that family will love her unconditionally. These words are not wrong, but they do not respond to her need for progress, achievement, and recognition. Arctic Empire propaganda happens to provide a simple answer: love and respect must be won through victory. Lily is thereby exposed to imperial propaganda for a long time, and later even leaves home for the Arctic-occupied zone.
But what makes Lily rethink is still a game. Helisport uses multiplicative scoring: if results from different events are multiplied, a competitor cannot win by specializing in only one event; the most effective strategy is to maintain balance. Lily further points out that the same is true of work and life—no matter how high the income, if there is no time to live, everything gained loses meaning. The Arctic teacher cannot refute her and can only rely on authority to punish her. Lily thereby discovers that what the empire calls "pursuing excellence" does not always respect ability; sometimes it merely demands obedience. She then decides to leave and eventually returns to her family.
Therefore, the novel does not simply oppose games, scores, or quantification mechanisms. What it truly asks is: who makes the rules, what the rules reward, and whether people will forget the goals that scores were originally meant to serve in order to win scores. Good mechanisms can limit power and promote cooperation; but no matter how ingenious the numbers, they cannot replace understanding of specific people.
Conclusion
Snowmoon is not a blockchain governance manual, nor is it a simple praise of technological utopia, but rather an inquiry into whether institutions still have the ability to discover errors and change themselves in the face of bias, infiltration, and war.
The aesthetic tax turns public feeling into scores, Graph Funding turns complex budgets into graphs, zero-knowledge proofs compress trust into necessary information, Dzego organizes society into roots that are difficult to pull out, and Minpentai rehearses war as a game. They all attempt to make a complex world coordinable, but they can also all be distorted by bias, interests, and mistaken goals.Northshore's victory likewise does not belong to any single mechanism. Redshire has still not been retaken, and the novel explicitly reminds readers: they have only won the first round, not the war outright.
Therefore, the answer offered by Snowmoon is not a perfect algorithm, but a capacity for continuous error correction: protecting privacy while preserving oversight; decentralizing power while still enabling coordinated action in a crisis; possessing the ability to win without turning victory into grounds for building a new hegemony. What is truly worth defending is not rules that are always correct, but the ability of a society to jointly revise its rules after discovering that they have ceased to work.