Ethereum Weakens, Vitalik Turns to Writing Novels, ETH Crashes and People Leave

Ethereum’s founder Vitalik announces the suspension of rewriting technical blog posts into a decentralized governance sci-fi novel, while the foundation simultaneously faces its most severe exodus of core members.
(Backstory: Ethereum Foundation’s major transformation—Vitalik releases the CROPS framework, scales down, and refuses to be an ETH dumping party.)
(Additional context: Vitalik urgently calls out ETH whales: the foundation is only a node—the value of Ethereum depends on you holding it up.)

Table of Contents

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• Vitalik freezes his blog: turns to sci-fi novel writing
• Veridia governance illusion: the fictional world where tax rates replace bans
• Personnel collapse: 9 core members leave, setting a record
• Hull shrinking: survival strategy after ETH falls below $2100
• Identity shift: a declaration from executor to ecosystem node

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Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is entering a creative turning point. On May 27, on the Farcaster platform, he announced that he will pause his long-running technical blog writing, and instead devote himself to creating a sci-fi novel about decentralized governance. Two chapters have already been completed, depicting the operating mechanism of a fictional country called Veridia. The timing is particularly noteworthy: at the same time, the Ethereum Foundation is facing the most severe personnel turmoil since the establishment of the organization. In 2026 alone, at least nine core members have left in succession, and the ETH price has also fallen below the $2100 threshold. Three days ago, Vitalik posted on X to defend the foundation’s transformation, openly acknowledging that the organization will move toward a “smaller ship” model.

Deep-dive preview: Vitalik Buterin announced on May 27 on Farcaster that he will suspend long-form blog writing and instead create a sci-fi novel centered on decentralized governance. Two chapters have been completed so far.

The novel constructs a fictional country called “Veridia,” where mechanisms such as second-round voting, privacy-preserving audits, and AI-assisted decision-making are put into practice. This timing is worth pondering: in 2026, the Ethereum Foundation has already seen at least 9 core members depart, ETH has fallen below $2100, and Vitalik himself only three days ago announced that the foundation will become a “smaller ship.”

Ethereum founder Vitalik isn’t writing technical blog posts anymore—he’s writing a novel…

On May 27, Vitalik Buterin published a short announcement on Farcaster: “Instead of continuing to write regular blog posts, I’ve decided to try writing some sci-fi novels about decentralized governance.” He attached a link pointing to the first and second chapters he has already completed on his personal website.

According to BeInCrypto’s report on May 27, this is a rare shift in format in Buterin’s public writing career.

Vitalik freezes the blog: turns to sci-fi novel creation

Over the past decade, his long-form writing has almost served as first-hand documentation of the evolution of Ethereum’s thinking—covering nearly all major core topics, from L2 scaling, DAO governance, to quadratic voting. Now, he chooses to pack these ideas into fictional narrative rather than continuing to write EIP-style technical arguments.

This choice in itself isn’t surprising. But the timing is hard not to make people think further:

Three days ago, he just published a long post on X defending the foundation’s personnel upheaval. Two weeks ago, the core leader of the foundation’s agreement team just collectively stepped down. Since the ETH price reached a peak close to $5000 in August 2025, it has fallen by more than 57% to date.

We had AI quickly read through the two chapters that have been written so far to see what Vitalik is actually trying to convey.

The story of the two chapters takes place in a fictional country called Veridia. The protagonist, Gladias, is a trainee member of the “Order of Steering.” This organization is the core executive body of Veridia’s governance system. It is responsible for maintaining a precise set of tax and subsidy judgment rubrics, replacing traditional legal bans.

Veridia’s governance logic is straightforward: it almost never directly prohibits anything; criminal law is extremely minimal. Instead, there is a social governance system driven by tax-rate incentives. If a band wants to sing a violent song, no one will arrest them—but they may be classified into a high-tax tier.

Veridia governance illusion: a fictional world where tax rates replace bans

The specific way this system operates is worth breaking down, because it is almost a novelized version of Vitalik’s technical blog posts from recent years:

“The Order of Steering” consists of three types of roles. “Keepers” are responsible for formulating and updating tax evaluation standards. “Sentinels” audit the classification of specific companies; a group of 9 is randomly selected via cryptography, divided into three groups to independently review, and then vote to determine the median. “Acolytes” are backups for the Keepers and Sentinels, responsible for lower-priority audits. The system continuously scores performance, and only those in the top 10% can be promoted.

Privacy protection is the underlying logic of the entire system. Members of the Order wear a unified “privacy robe” to conceal their identities. They are strictly forbidden from disclosing audit assignments. Anyone can reveal a member’s identity by submitting guesses through a decentralized cryptography network—if the guess is correct, the member’s salary is docked, and the whistleblower receives half of it 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 billboard ads on buses) and score them using sliders.

Here appears the quadratic voting that Vitalik has advocated for years. All votes are automatically standardized so that each person’s average score is zero and the variance is one. Extreme votes compress your speaking power on other issues. In the novel’s original wording, mathematically, this mechanism can be proven to be optimal—the intensity of voting should match the strength of your true feelings, neither more nor less.

The second chapter shifts to a scene in an underground educational community called Dzego, where two students cross the city to attend physics classes. Dzego’s survival strategy is summarized in four words: “Rooted without a head”—taking root locally, with no centralized leadership. The location of the classroom is decrypted and announced through encrypted broadcasts before class. Teaching venues are covered with signal-shielding foil, and security upgrades frequently switch cryptographic proof systems.

Personnel collapse: 9 core members leave, setting a record

If you look only at the content of the novel, it’s a well-crafted governance sci-fi story. But when you put it back into the context of Ethereum in 2026, the parallels become clearer.

In the novel, Veridia’s “Order of Steering” is a decentralized, anonymous, cryptographically protected governance organization with no single authority. Members advance through ability rankings. In reality, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has experienced the most severe personnel losses since its founding in 2026.

According to the combined statistics reported by CoinDesk on May 18 and Unchained on May 20, at least 9 senior contributors have already left or announced they will leave the foundation from 2026 to date. Co-Executive Director Tomasz Stańczak resigned in February this year, with a term of less than one year. Operations and Writing lead Josh Stark left in March, after working at the foundation for 7 years. Protocol Guild founder Trent Van Epps also left in April.

The shock in May was even more concentrated.

The co-leads of the Protocol Cluster, Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot, both stepped down at the same time, and Alex Stokes entered an indefinite leave. In the following week, early beacon chain design contributor Carl Beek (7 years of service) and Julian Ma, the core author of the anti-censorship mechanism FOCIL (EIP-7805), also announced their resignations one after another.

On May 24—three days before announcing that he would write the novel—Vitalik posted a long article on X responding to this personnel storm. He compared the foundation to “a smaller ship,” pointing out that it will focus on the CROPS framework (anti-censorship, resistance to centralization pressure, openness, privacy, security). He also admitted that the foundation’s initial technical mission was essentially completed as early as 2022, and that it is currently shifting from an expansion-oriented organization to a sustainability-oriented organization.

Hull shrinking: survival strategy after ETH falls below $2100

He also revealed that 90% of his net assets are still ETH, and that the ETH held by the foundation accounts for only 0.16% of the total supply, worth approximately $408 million.

“The foundation chooses to pursue survival with remaining resources rather than breadth—yes, that means we sell less ETH,” Vitalik wrote. Interim Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue (who took over from Stańczak in February this year) is carrying out this transformation.

Compare this statement with Veridia’s governance system in the novel: the novel features cryptographically guaranteed decentralized audits, mathematically provably optimal quadratic voting, and an evaluation system that is AI-assisted but does not replace human judgment.

But in reality, the foundation cannot even retain core R&D personnel. The focus of governance discussions is “who is leaving” and “why they are leaving.”

In terms of the community’s reaction to Vitalik writing sci-fi itself, the response has been relatively positive. crypto.news reported on May 27 that Buterin has effectively moved his thinking on decentralized governance from whitepapers and blog formats to 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 previously had consistently argued that quadratic voting and multi-mechanism approaches can dilute the influence of large token holders. The novel’s narrative format gives him room to dramatize these mechanisms in fictional cities and crisis scenarios.

Identity shift: a declaration from executor to ecosystem node

His recent statement referring to the foundation as “one of many nodes,” also explains why this announcement was posted on Farcaster rather than on a centralized social platform.

But there are also sharper voices.

At a time when the foundation has just lost almost all of the core members of the protocol team, the founder’s allocation of effort itself is a signal. Vitalik himself had laid the groundwork for this in his long X post on May 24—he clearly pointed out that his internal power within the foundation will continue to shrink: “That’s exactly what I want.” The transition is executed by Bastian Aue, not by himself.

From this perspective, writing sci-fi is also a declaration of identity switching. He is no longer a core executor of the foundation, but rather a thought node within the Ethereum ecosystem.

This also lines up perfectly with Veridia’s governance philosophy in the novel—everything is unfolding as intended.