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Ethereum's founder Vitalik is no longer writing technical blogs; he has turned to writing novels instead...

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The story of the two-chapter novel takes place in a fictional country called Veridia, where the protagonist Gladias is an apprentice member of the "Order of Steering." This organization is the core executive body of Veridia's governance system, responsible for maintaining a precise set of tax and subsidy assessment criteria (rubrics) to replace traditional legal prohibitions.

Veridia's governance logic is clear: it hardly directly prohibits anything, and its criminal law is extremely concise. Instead, it employs a social governance system driven by tax rate incentives. A band wants to sing violent songs, no one will arrest them, but they may be placed in a higher tax bracket as a result.

The specific operation of this system is worth breaking down because it is almost a fictionalized presentation of Vitalik's technical blog posts over the past few years:

The "Order of Steering" consists of three types of roles. "Keepers" are responsible for establishing and updating tax assessment criteria; "Sentinels" are responsible for auditing specific businesses' classifications, with a 9-person group randomly selected via cryptography, divided into three independent groups for review and voting, with the median selected; "Acolytes" are backups for Keepers and Sentinels, responsible for low-priority audits, with continuous system scoring, and only the top 10% performance can lead to promotion.

Privacy protection is the underlying logic of the entire system. Members of the Order of Steering wear a uniform "privacy robe" to conceal their identities, strictly prohibit the disclosure of audit tasks, and anyone can submit guesses through a decentralized cryptographic network to reveal a member's identity—correct guesses lead to salary deductions for the member and the revealer receiving half as a bounty. The goal of this mechanism is to prevent bribery and external influence.

In the first chapter of the novel, the protagonist also participates in another form of public governance: public aesthetic scoring. Citizens are randomly assigned to public goods (such as billboards on buses) and rate them using a slider.

Here, Vitalik's long-standing endorsement of quadratically-weighted voting emerges: all votes are automatically standardized, so that everyone's average is zero, with a variance of one, and extreme votes will diminish your influence on other issues. In the novel, the exact words are that this mechanism is mathematically proven to be optimal—the intensity of your vote should match the intensity of your true feelings, no more, no less.

The scene shifts to an underground education community called Dzego in the second chapter, where two students traverse the city to attend a physics class. Dzego's survival strategy is summarized in four words: "rooted without a head"—rooted in place, no centralized leadership. The location of the classroom is revealed through encrypted broadcasts before class, and the teaching place is covered with signal-blocking foil, with frequent security upgrades and cryptographic proof system switches.

What is written in novels is what cannot be achieved in reality

Viewed in isolation, the novel is just a well-crafted piece of speculative fiction. But when placed back in the context of Ethereum in 2026, the parallels become clear.

In the novel, Veridia's "Guidance Sequence" is a decentralized, anonymous, cryptographically protected governance organization with no single authority, where members advance through a meritocratic ranking. In reality, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has experienced its most significant personnel exodus since its inception in 2026.

According to reports from CoinDesk on May 18 and Unchained on May 20, since 2026, at least 9 senior contributors have left or announced their impending departure from the foundation. Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak resigned in February after serving less than a year in the role; Operations and Communications Lead Josh Stark departed in March after 7 years at the foundation; and Protocol Guild founder Trent Van Epps similarly resigned in April.

The impact in May was even more concentrated.

Protocol Cluster co-leads Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot stepped down simultaneously, while Alex Stokes went on indefinite leave. Within the following week, early beacon chain design contributor Carl Beek (7 years in the role) and core author of the anti-censorship mechanism FOCIL (EIP-7805) Julian Ma both announced their resignations.

On May 24, three days before the announcement of the novel, Vitalik posted a lengthy response on X to the personnel storm. He likened the foundation to "a smaller ship," stating a focus on the CROPS framework (Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security) and acknowledging that the foundation's original technical mission was largely accomplished in 2022, with the current shift from an expansive to a sustainable organization.

He also revealed that 90% of his net worth is still in ETH, with the foundation holding only 0.16% of the total supply, valued at around $408 million.

"The foundation is choosing to allocate its remaining resources to sustainability rather than breadth, which does mean selling less ETH," wrote Vitalik. Interim Co-executive Director Bastian Aue (who took over from Stańczak in February) is overseeing this transition.

Compare this sentence with the governance system of Veridia in the novel: The novel features a cryptographically assured decentralized audit, a mathematically provable Quadratic Voting, and an AI-assisted evaluation system that does not replace human judgment.

However, in reality, the foundation cannot even retain its core developers, and governance discussions focus on "who is leaving" and "why they are leaving."

Community Reaction: The novel is worth reading, but the timing is bittersweet

Regarding Vitalik's writing of science fiction itself, the community's reaction has been relatively positive. On May 27, crypto.news reported that Buterin had actually shifted his thoughts on decentralized governance from whitepapers and blog formats to speculative storytelling, using a fictional world to test the coordination, incentive, and power distribution issues he had previously discussed in papers.

An analysis by BeInCrypto pointed out that Vitalik has always advocated for Quadratic Voting and a diverse mechanism to dilute the influence of large holders. The narrative format of the novel gave him space to dramatize these mechanisms in a fictional city and crisis scenario.

His recent characterization of the foundation as "one of many nodes" also explains why this announcement was made on Farcaster rather than a centralized social platform.

But there are also sharper voices.

At a time when the foundation has just lost almost all core members of the protocol team, the founder's energy allocation is itself a signal. Vitalik himself laid the groundwork for this in a lengthy post on May 24 — he explicitly stated that his power within the foundation will continue to diminish, "which is exactly what I want," with the transition being led by Bastian Aue instead of himself.

From this perspective, writing science fiction is also a declaration of identity shift: he is no longer the core executor of the foundation but a node of thought in the Ethereum ecosystem.

This also aligns perfectly with Veridia's governance philosophy in the novel. Everything is as desired.