Author: Claude, Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Introduction: On May 27th, Vitalik Buterin announced on Farcaster that he is pausing his long-form blog writing to focus on creating a science fiction novel centered on decentralized governance. He has completed two chapters so far.
The novel is set in a fictional country called "Veridia," which operates mechanisms like quadratic voting, privacy-protecting audits, and AI-assisted decision-making. The timing of this shift is noteworthy: by 2026, at least 9 core members have already left the Ethereum Foundation, the price of ETH has fallen below the $2,100 mark, and just three days prior, Vitalik himself announced that the Foundation would become a "smaller ship."
Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, isn't writing technical blogs anymore. He's writing a novel...
On May 27th, Vitalik Buterin posted a brief statement on Farcaster: "Instead of continuing with regular blog posts, I've decided to try writing some sci-fi about decentralized governance," along with a link to the first two chapters on his personal website.
According to a BeInCrypto report on May 27th, this marks a rare formal shift in Buterin's public writing career.
Over the past decade, his long-form articles have essentially constituted first-hand literature for the evolution of Ethereum's ideas, covering nearly all core topics from L2 scaling and DAO governance to quadratic voting. Now, he's chosen to embed these ideas into a fictional narrative instead of continuing with EIP-style technical arguments.
This choice in itself isn't surprising. But the timing is hard not to think about:
Just three days prior, he published a lengthy post on X defending the Foundation's personnel turmoil. Two weeks ago, core leads of the Foundation's protocol team had collectively departed. The price of ETH has fallen more than 57% from its peak near $5,000 in August 2025.
"Veridia" in the Novel: The Governance System of Vitalik's Ideals
We had an AI quickly read the two completed chapters to see what Vitalik really wants to express.
The story of the two chapters takes place in a fictional country called Veridia. 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 sophisticated set of tax and subsidy assessment rubrics, which replace traditional legal prohibitions.
Veridia's governance logic is clear: it almost never directly bans anything. The criminal code is extremely streamlined, replaced by a social governance system driven by tax rate incentives. A band wants to sing violent songs? No one will arrest them, but they might be classified into a higher tax bracket because of it.
The specific operation of this system is worth dissecting, as it's almost a fictionalized presentation 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 formulating and updating the tax assessment rubrics. "Sentinels" are responsible for auditing the classification of specific enterprises. A panel of 9 is randomly selected via cryptography, divided into three groups for independent deliberation, with the median of their votes taken. "Acolytes" are the reserve pool for Keepers and Sentinels, handling lower-priority audits. The system continuously scores them, and only the top 10% performers get promoted.
Privacy protection is the underlying logic of the entire system. Members of the Order wear uniform "privacy robes" to conceal their identities and are strictly forbidden from leaking audit tasks. Anyone can submit a guess through a decentralized cryptographic network to reveal a member's identity. If correct, the member gets a salary deduction, and the whistleblower gets half as a bounty. The goal of this mechanism is to prevent bribery and external influence.
In the first chapter, the protagonist also participates in another form of public governance: public aesthetic scoring. Citizens are randomly assigned to public goods (like billboards on buses) and score them using sliders. Here, quadratic voting—something Vitalik has championed for years—appears: all votes are automatically normalized so that each person's average score is zero and variance is one. Extreme votes compress your influence on other issues. The novel's line is that this mechanism is mathematically proven optimal—voting intensity should match the intensity of your true feelings, no more, no less.
The second chapter shifts scenes to an underground educational community called Dzego, where two students travel across the city for a physics class. Dzego's survival strategy is summarized in four words: "Rooted but leaderless." Classroom locations are decrypted via an encrypted broadcast announced just before class. The teaching venue is covered in signal-blocking foil, with security protocols frequently switching cryptographic proof systems.
What's Written into the Novel Is What Can't Be Pushed Through in Reality
Looking at the novel's content alone, it's just a cleverly conceived piece of governance sci-fi. But placed back into the context of Ethereum in 2026, the parallels become clear.
The "Order of Steering" in Veridia is a decentralized, anonymous, cryptographically protected governance organization with no single authority, where members are promoted based on performance rankings. In reality, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) in 2026 has experienced its most significant personnel exodus since its inception.
According to a comprehensive tally from a CoinDesk report on May 18th and an Unchained report on May 20th, at least 9 senior contributors have left or announced their impending departure from the Foundation since the start of 2026. Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak resigned in February, serving less than a year; Operations and Writing Lead Josh Stark left in March after 7 years; Protocol Guild founder Trent Van Epps also left in April.
The impact in May was 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-year tenure) and Julian Ma, core author of the anti-censorship mechanism FOCIL (EIP-7805), also announced their resignations.
On May 24th, just three days before announcing the novel, Vitalik posted a long thread on X responding to this personnel storm. He likened the Foundation to "a smaller ship," stating it would focus on the CROPS framework (Censorship Resistance, Centralization-resistance pressures, Openness, Privacy, Security). He acknowledged that the Foundation's original technical mission was largely complete by 2022, and it was now transitioning from an expansionary to a sustaining organization.
He also revealed that 90% of his net worth is still in ETH and that the Foundation holds only 0.16% of the total ETH supply, worth approximately $408 million.
"The Foundation is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity rather than breadth, and yes, that means we sell less ETH," Vitalik wrote. Interim Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue (who replaced Stańczak in February) is executing this transition.
Contrast this statement with Veridia's governance system in the novel: in the fiction, there's cryptographically guaranteed decentralized auditing, mathematically proven optimal quadratic voting, and AI-assisted but not human-replacing evaluation systems.
But in reality, the Foundation struggles to retain even its core R&D personnel, with governance discussions focusing on "who is leaving" and "why."
Community Reaction: The Novel Deserves a Serious Read, but the Timing Is Bittersweet
The community's reaction to Vitalik writing sci-fi itself has been relatively positive. A crypto.news report on May 27th commented that Buterin is essentially migrating his thoughts on decentralized governance from whitepapers and blog formats into speculative storytelling, using a fictional world to test the coordination, incentives, and power distribution issues he previously discussed in papers.
BeInCrypto's analysis pointed out that Vitalik has long advocated that quadratic voting and pluralistic mechanisms can dilute the influence of large token holders. The narrative format of the novel gives him space to dramatize these mechanisms within fictional cities and crisis scenarios.
His recent statement describing the Foundation as "one of many nodes" also explains why this announcement was posted on Farcaster rather than a centralized social platform.
However, more critical voices exist.
At a time when the Foundation has just lost almost all core members of its protocol team, the founder's allocation of energy is itself a signal. Vitalik himself laid the groundwork for this in his May 24th X thread—he explicitly stated that his power within the Foundation will continue to diminish, "which is what I want," and that the transition is being executed by Bastian Aue, not by him.
From this perspective, writing sci-fi is also a declaration of a role switch: he is no longer the core executor for the Foundation, but a node of thought within the Ethereum ecosystem.
This also aligns perfectly with Veridia's governance philosophy in the novel. Everything is going as planned.
