Article by KarenZ, Foresight News
An office building, shaped like an airplane, was subject to a 0.59% "aesthetic tax."
A heavy metal band with lyrics full of violence won't be banned, but may be classified into a higher tax bracket.
A toy drone flies overhead, and the pedestrian’s smartwatch confirms via zero-knowledge proof that it has a safety program preventing it from approaching too closely. Beyond this, the watch gains no additional information such as the drone’s model or owner.
This is the world introduced at the beginning of *Snowmoon*. Technology is not displayed in a showcase as a "future spectacle," but has already sunk into the foundations of tickets, loans, taxes, voting, urban planning, and public health.
Snowmoon consists of 32 chapters. On the novel's homepage, Vitalik states that the main text was written directly by him; Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next were primarily used for spelling, grammar, and style checks, as well as verifying the rules of the Minpentai game and the Dzegoban language, and handling HTML, CSS, and SVG.
On the surface, it’s about how several nations resist the expansion of the Arctic Empire. On a deeper level, it explores a long-standing concern of Vitalik’s: how can a free, decentralized, privacy-protecting society gain the capacity to act against powerful forces without becoming a new power itself after victory?
Four societies, four ways of organizing the world
The story primarily involves Veridia, Dzego, the Arctic Empire, Redshire, and the city of Freetown within the United Cities system. These entities do not occupy the same political level: Veridia and Dzego are nations, the Arctic Empire is an expansionist empire, Redshire was an independent political entity later annexed, and Freetown is a city within the United Cities.
Veridia values privacy, health, the environment, and social collaboration. It rarely prohibits behaviors directly, preferring instead to alter incentives through taxation, subsidies, and public funding.
Sugar reduction is a classic example: Veridia did not ban sugary drinks but instead continuously influenced corporate decisions through taxation. As a result, the beverage brand Hydrafill gradually reformulated its products over two decades, making its product line nearly sugar-free. Individuals still have the choice, and companies can continue selling, but the health costs are incorporated into economic incentives.
Dzego has long faced threats from the Arctic Empire, so it has decentralized its education, industry, and security capabilities across anonymous networks and underground facilities.
Freetown is more market-driven, relying on businesses, insurance, and commercial contracts to solve problems; it offers high freedom but struggles to coordinate resources for public services such as national defense.
The Arctic Empire emphasizes competition, hierarchy, technological advancement, and unified goals. It acts swiftly, with efficiency derived from centralized power and individual obedience.
These societies are not simply black-and-white contrasts of good versus evil. Veridia values cooperation but may be slow to respond; Dzego is difficult to "decapitate" but operates with high secrecy; Freetown protects individual choice but may lack the capacity for collective action; the Arctic Empire is the most efficient but also the most likely to turn society into a tool of its rulers.
Two protagonists, two mindsets
The two main plotlines of the novel belong to Gladias and Zei.
Gladias is a citizen of Veridia. At the start of the story, he was an Acolyte of the Order of Steering, responsible for designing tax and social incentive policies; after four years of experience, ranking in the top 10% of predictive performance, and passing a parliamentary hearing, he became a full Keeper, participating in the revision of tax and social impact rules. He is accustomed to thinking in terms of systems, fairness, and the public good.
Zei is a young prodigy and champion of the complex strategy game Minpentai, excelling at finding winning strategies amid sudden rule changes, incomplete information, and opponents' deliberate deception.
Gladias thinks about how to design the rules, while Zei thinks about how to act within constantly changing rules.
After the Arctic Empire annexed Redshire, Gladias realized that Veridia lacked not only weapons but also the ability to detect infiltration and act swiftly. He therefore traveled to Dzego, a long-standing resistor of the Arctic Empire.
Introduced by Seila, Gladias met Zei and Bai. Seila is a writer who frequently travels and observes other social systems; Bai is Zei’s friend and a competitor of Minpentai. Gladias then connected with Kungaupei—the secret network responsible for Dzego’s underground security, industrial coordination, and external resistance. The two storylines now truly converge.
Later, the Arctic Empire invaded Northglade in northern Veridia. Gladias leveraged his knowledge of Veridia’s politics, courts, and public governance to drive military reforms; Zei and Kungaupei provided cryptography, intelligence, and counterstrategy. These efforts ultimately enabled the more reliable general, Lektor, to take command of the army and laid the groundwork for a counteroffensive.
Gladias represents rules and legitimacy, while Zei represents prediction, adaptability, and the ability to act. A society with rules but no capacity for action will collapse in times of crisis; a society with only the ability to win but no rules to constrain it may become another Arctic Empire.
Veridia: Embedding value judgments into institutions
Veridia's most unusual policy is the public aesthetic tax.
Buildings can be privately owned, but their facades occupy public space over the long term and may thus incur public costs. Veridia does not prohibit developers from constructing an office building shaped like an airplane; instead, it uses a cryptographic system to randomly select citizens to rate buildings, and these ratings are converted into a component of property tax. Attractive, context-sensitive buildings may receive tax reductions, while those deemed unattractive are subject to higher taxes.
The novel refers to this scoring system as quadratic voting. Its specific implementation differs slightly from the common real-world concept of "the more votes you cast, the higher the cost increases quadratically": the system adjusts a voter’s entire set of scores so that their average is 0 and the average of their squared scores is 1. This prevents participants from giving high scores to all buildings or using extreme scores indiscriminately, forcing them to reserve their limited intensity of preference for the objects they truly value.
The issue is that mathematics can only organize preferences, not guarantee their fairness. In Chapter 3, a passerby complains that many people, due to their dislike of Greater Plum Harbor, deliberately claim its walls are ugly in order to increase its property taxes. This illustrates how subjective aesthetic ratings can be influenced by social hostility external to the architecture, thereby becoming a tool for excluding non-mainstream groups.
Veridia's public funds are also distributed through various mechanisms.
Quadratic Funding increases the weight of projects with many independent small supporters in public matching, while reducing the influence of single large donors. Graph Funding models a portion of public fund allocation as a directed acyclic graph: funds flow step by step from broader areas, such as health, to specific directions like airborne diseases, ventilation, testing, and treatment. Cryptographic networks randomly select committees for each node, and these committees determine the weight of fund allocation to direct child nodes; if a project serves multiple areas, it can receive funding through multiple pathways.
However, the novel does not present these mechanisms as universal solutions. Quadratic Funding can be manipulated by corporations and foreign powers, expert committees may be captured by interest groups, and project teams might continuously tailor their proposals to please evaluators. To address this, Graph Funding introduces "randomization within the excellence range": any project that ranks in the top 10% receives an equal chance of selection, eliminating the forced distinction between a score of 91 and 99.
This is a correction for over-quantification: metrics can provide accountability, but false precision can distort behavior.
Zipcoin is both a currency and a coordination tool.
Zipcoin is the widely used digital currency in the Snowmoon novel universe.
In Veridia, Gladias uses Zipcoin to pay for meals, sales tax, and loans; in Dzego, restaurants also accept anonymized Zipcoin for payments; in Freetown, shelters list prices directly in Zipcoin; in Redshire, occupied by the Arctic Empire, soldiers even accept Zipcoin to help residents conceal secret messages within health data.
However, the novel does not specify who issues it, whether it is pegged to any asset, how its supply changes, or the underlying consensus mechanism.
Zipcoin circulates through digital wallets and a cryptographic network, supporting encrypted transactions, anonymous payments, and social recovery. Gladias’s wallet requires four out of six designated亲友 to co-sign for recovery.
In one case, Gladias pledged 2,773 Zipcoins using his personal reputation as collateral. The system generated a zero-knowledge proof to verify that his reputation was sufficient, while using a nullifier to prevent the same reputation from being pledged multiple times. The public network only sees the loan amount and the nullifier, not Gladias’s name or his full reputation record.
Everyday spending also protects privacy. When Gladias pays 10.5 Zipcoins at a restaurant, only he and the restaurant know the details of the transaction; sales tax is automatically and instantly transferred to the government. The government does not store detailed spending records of all citizens but enforces compliance by randomly auditing merchants to ensure they use approved transaction types.
Zipcoin can also generate "expensive signals." Someone burns 400 Zipcoins to send a high-priority message to a group of anonymous recipients meeting specific criteria. Destroying currency does not prove the content's authenticity, but it demonstrates that the sender is willing to incur an irrecoverable cost, warranting the recipient's attention.
Zipcoin is therefore not just a payment tool, but also the infrastructure for coordinating resources, filtering information, and establishing credible signals within the novel.
After the novel's release, the community created a project on Ethereum with the same name, Zipcoin (ZC). The project documentation explicitly states that it was inspired by *Snowmoon*, has a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, and has no official affiliation with Vitalik. As of the date of this writing, September 29, 2026, its fully diluted valuation once exceeded $20 million and is currently around $15 million.
Zero-Knowledge Society: Prove Eligibility Without Revealing Yourself
Snowmoon's understanding of privacy is not about refusing to prove anything, but about proving only what is necessary.
When entering the event, the system only verifies that the visitor holds a valid, unused ticket, without knowing who the ticket holder is; the drone only proves that its safety protocols meet requirements, without exposing any other data; when applying for a loan, the system only demonstrates that the collateral reputation is sufficient, without disclosing the full identity.
The Order of Steering follows the same logic. However, its members are not simply selected by lottery: Gladias must complete an apprenticeship, meet predictive performance criteria, and pass a parliamentary hearing; only after becoming full members are specific tax rule Keeper duties and corporate audit tasks cryptographically randomized. Participants use anonymous discussion and voting systems, along with privacy robes that conceal facial features, body shape, voice, and gait, to reduce the risks of bribery, threats, and targeted lobbying.
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 rhetoric centered on freedom, anti-intervention, and anti-war sentiments, then fabricates false leads to make Gladias believe he represents the social platform Silverchat.
After investigation, Seila found that Delwart had been presenting 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 education—yet failing to genuinely address the open and interoperable issues that Silverchat cares about most.
Delwart does not attack cryptographic protocols, but rather the cognition of decision-makers. Governance attacks do not necessarily occur in code—they can also take place within the minds of decision-makers.
Dzego: Extensive root system, no central hub
Dzego's core slogan is "grow roots, no head," which can be translated as "spread roots, no central hub."
Here, "headless" does not mean that Dzego has no government or leader; rather, it emphasizes that key systems do not rely on a public, fixed, and irreplaceable central authority.
The "root system" includes distributed manufacturing, underground facilities, mobile classrooms, and anonymous collaboration through cryptography. The Arctic Empire can attack a single classroom or a large factory, but it is difficult to destroy all distributed nodes simultaneously. Even if one node is compromised, the entire network can continue to operate.
Therefore, this slogan does not describe anarchy, but rather a resilient structure designed to avoid single points of failure. It illustrates how decentralization can enhance society’s resilience against war, infiltration, and power control, but does not automatically ensure democracy: how anonymous and covert coordination mechanisms can be held accountable remains an open 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: establish rules, track scores, and modify participants' behavior through rewards and punishments.
Minpentai is not just entertainment. It is, in fact, Dzego’s concealed military training designed to cultivate individuals capable of handling sudden changes, incomplete information, resource constraints, enemy deception, and team collaboration. Dzego hid genuine defense capabilities within the game, making it difficult for the Northern Empire to directly identify and destroy them. Later, Zei applied the mindset developed in the matches to real warfare, blurring the line between game and battlefield.
The thermodynamics lesson in Chapter Two introduced the concept of "entropy." The teacher used two containers of gas to illustrate: after cold and hot gases mix, more information is needed to accurately describe the motion of each molecule, so the total amount of uncertainty increases. Humans cannot make uncertainty vanish into thin air; instead, they can only strive to understand what truly matters, leaving unavoidable uncertainty in insignificant details. Students understood thermodynamics without needing to know the exact speed of each molecule as the projector cooled.
The subsequent explosion literally created even more chaos, turning classroom theory into reality all at once. Relocating classrooms, using anti-wireless materials, and employing encrypted communications did not eliminate information—they controlled who received it: ensuring allies gained the knowledge needed for action, while leaving enemies faced with greater uncertainty. This is a narrative extension of the concept of "entropy" in fiction, not a strict physical conclusion.
“Scores” are the most direct manifestation of the rules. Veridia aims to reduce individual arbitrariness through scoring criteria, random committees, and predictive evaluations; the Arctic Empire venerates individuals’ “intellectual scores”; while Dzego’s proposed “coordination score” belongs to the entire community, measuring people’s ability to escape destructive competition and collectively shift toward better choices. The difference among them lies not in whether numbers are used, but in whether individual triumph or collective collaboration is rewarded.
Lily’s experience, the daughter of Gladias and Seila, reveals the shared limitations of grading systems and家庭教育. When she scored 59 on an exam, Gladias told her, “Grades don’t define everything,” and emphasized that her family would love her unconditionally. While these words were not wrong, they failed to address her needs for progress, achievement, and recognition. The Arctic Empire’s propaganda offered precisely the simple answer she was seeking: love and respect must be earned through victory. Lily subsequently became deeply exposed to imperial propaganda and eventually left home to join the Arctic-occupied territories.
But what made Lily reconsider was still a game. Helisport used multiplicative scoring: if scores from different events were multiplied, focusing on just one event wouldn’t lead to victory—the most effective strategy was to maintain balance. Lily further pointed out that the same applies to work and life—no matter how high your income, if you have no time to live, everything you gain loses meaning. The Arctic teacher could not refute her and could only resort to authoritative punishment. From this, Lily realized that the Empire’s notion of “pursuing excellence” did not always respect ability; sometimes, it merely demanded obedience. She then decided to leave, ultimately returning to her family.
Therefore, the novel does not simply oppose games, points, or quantification systems. It truly asks: Who sets the rules? What do the rules reward? And will people forget the very goals that points were meant to serve in their pursuit of higher scores? Good systems can limit power and foster cooperation; but no matter how sophisticated the numbers, they can never replace an understanding of real people.
Conclusion
Snowmoon is not a manual for blockchain governance, nor a simple celebration of technological utopia, but an examination of whether institutions still have the capacity to recognize and correct their own mistakes in the face of bias, infiltration, and war.
Aesthetic tax turns collective sentiment into scores; Graph Funding transforms complex budgets into graphs; zero-knowledge proofs compress trust into essential information; Dzego organizes social structures into deeply entrenched root systems; Minpentai turns war simulations into games. All of them attempt to make the complex world coordinatable, yet all may be distorted by bias, interests, and misaligned objectives.
Northshore's victory also does not belong to any single mechanism. Redshire has not yet been reclaimed, and the note clearly reminds readers that they have only won the first round, not the entire war.
Therefore, Snowmoon’s answer is not a perfect algorithm, but a capacity for continuous correction: protecting privacy while preserving oversight; decentralizing power while enabling coordinated action in crises; possessing the ability to win without turning victory into justification for establishing new authority. What is truly worth defending is not infallible rules, but society’s ability to collectively revise them once they have proven ineffective.