TechFlow Summary: Vitalik Buterin announced on May 27 on Farcaster that he is pausing long-form blogging and instead working on a science fiction novel with decentralized governance as the main theme. He has already completed two chapters.
The novel builds a fictional country named "Veridia," where mechanisms such as quadratic voting, privacy-preserving audits, AI-assisted decision-making, and other similar features are in place. The timing of this shift is noteworthy: at least 9 core Ethereum Foundation members have left by 2026, ETH's price has dropped below $2,100, and Vitalik himself announced three days ago that the foundation will become a "smaller ship."
Ethereum's founder Vitalik is no longer writing technical blogs; he is now writing a novel...
On May 27, Vitalik Buterin posted a brief statement on Farcaster: "Instead of continuing to write regular blogs, I have decided to try my hand at writing some science fiction about decentralized governance," with a link to the first and second chapters already completed on his personal website.
As reported by BeInCrypto on May 27, this marks a rare formal shift in Buterin's public writing career.
Over the past decade, his long-form articles have constituted primary documentation of Ethereum's ideation evolution, covering almost all core topics from L2 scaling, DAO governance, to quadratic voting. Now he has chosen to encapsulate these ideas into fictional narratives instead of continuing to write EIP-style technical arguments.
While the choice itself is not surprising, the timing is hard to ignore:
Just three days ago, he defended the foundation's internal turmoil in a lengthy post on X, and two weeks ago, the core protocol team of the foundation collectively departed, with ETH's price plummeting over 57% from its peak near $5,000 in August 2025.
"Veridia" in the Novel: Vitalik's Ideal Governance System
We ran the currently completed two chapters through an AI speed read to see what Vitalik is trying to convey.
The story of the two-chapter novel takes place in a fictional country called Veridia, where the protagonist Gladias is a novice member of the Order of Steering. This organization is the core executive body of Veridia's governance system, responsible for maintaining a set of precise tax and subsidy assessment standards (rubrics) to replace traditional legal prohibitions.
Veridia's governance logic is very clear: it hardly directly prohibits anything, the criminal code is extremely concise, and instead, there is a tax-rate-driven social governance system. If a band wants to sing a violent song, no one will arrest them, but they may be placed in a high tax bracket as a result.
The specific operation of this system is worth dissecting because it is almost a novelization of Vitalik's technical blog posts from the past few years:
The "Order of Steering" consists of three types of roles. "Keepers" are responsible for establishing and updating tax assessment standards; "Sentinels" are responsible for auditing specific business classifications, a 9-person group randomly selected via cryptography, divided into three independently deliberating groups, and the median vote is taken after voting; "Acolytes" are backups for Keepers and Sentinels, responsible for low-priority audits, with continuous system scoring, and only the top 10% performance can be promoted.
Privacy protection is the underlying logic of the entire system. Order of Steering members wear a uniform "privacy robe" to conceal their identities, strictly prohibit leaking audit tasks, and anyone can submit guesses through a decentralized cryptographic network to reveal member identities—guess correctly, members will be docked pay, and the revealer receives 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 advertisements on buses) and rate them using sliders.
Here, Vitalik's long-standing advocacy of quadratically weighted voting appears: all votes are automatically standardized, making the average score zero and the variance one for each person, and extreme voting compresses your influence on other issues. The novel's exact words are that this mechanism can be mathematically proven to be optimal—voting intensity should match the intensity of your true feelings, not more, not less.
In the second chapter, the scene shifts to an underground educational community called Dzego, where two students traverse the city to attend a physics class. Dzego's survival strategy is summarized in four words: "Rooted Without a Head"—taking root in a place, without centralized leadership. The classroom location is decrypted and revealed through encrypted broadcasts before class, the teaching venue is covered with signal-blocking foil, and security is upgraded with frequent switches in cryptographic proof systems.
What is written in novels is often beyond the reach of reality
Viewed in isolation, the novel's content is merely a well-crafted piece of governance science fiction. However, when placed back into the context of Ethereum in 2026, the parallels become clear.
The "Guiding Order" of Veridia in the novel is a decentralized, anonymous, cryptographically protected governance organization with no single authority, where members advance through skill rankings. In reality, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) in 2026 has experienced its most significant personnel exodus since its establishment.
According to reports from CoinDesk on May 18 and Unchained on May 20, as of 2026, at least 9 senior contributors have left or announced their departure from the Foundation. Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak resigned in February this year, serving for less than a year; Operations and Communications Lead Josh Stark left in March after 7 years with the Foundation; and Protocol Guild founder Trent Van Epps similarly resigned in April.
The impact in May was even more concentrated.
Co-leads of the Protocol Cluster, Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot, stepped down simultaneously, while Alex Stokes went on an indefinite leave. Within the following week, early Beacon Chain design contributor Carl Beek (7-year tenure) and core author of the anti-censorship mechanism FOCIL (EIP-7805) Julian Ma both announced their resignations.
On May 24, three days before announcing the novel, Vitalik posted a lengthy response to the personnel storm on X. He likened the Foundation to "a smaller ship," stating a focus on the CROPS framework (Censorship Resistance, Openness, Privacy, Security), acknowledging that the Foundation's original technical mission was largely accomplished in 2022 and is now transitioning from an expansive to a sustaining organization.
He also revealed that 90% of his net worth is still in ETH, with the Foundation holding ETH accounting for only 0.16% of the total supply, valued at around $408 million.
"The Foundation has chosen to utilize the remaining resources to pursue sustainability rather than breadth, yes, this means we sell less ETH," wrote Vitalik. Interim Co-executive Director Bastian Aue (who took over from Stańczak in February) is overseeing this transition.
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