Zei

The narrative of Zei in Chapter 2 of Veridia isn't just sci-fi—it’s a masterclass in cypherpunk survival and decentralized resistance. Zei lives in Dzego, a society occupied by the authoritarian Arctic Empire. The Empire's strategy? Keep the population technologically suppressed so they can never rebel. But Zei's people have a counter-strategy: "gie fe pia kai ci bin hu" — Grow roots, no head. Instead of a centralized military, they fight back via an invisible infrastructure: • Classrooms that only reveal their locations via time-locked cryptographic proofs. • Walls lined with anti-transmission foil to block imperial surveillance. • Distributed manufacturing to build advanced tools completely off-grid. When the Empire launches a kinetic missile strike directly at Zei’s physics class to stamp out their education, the network saves them. Anonymous routing changed their room at the last minute. The core lesson Zei learns through thermodynamics is the ultimate metaphor for crypto: In a complex system, information and local autonomy cannot be forced back into a box. By keeping the official government stupid and corrupt as a shield, the real society operates peer-to-peer, completely anonymously. "Dze go ba fau gie" — Dzego will rise again. Not with an army, but through an unbreakable, leaderless network. TLDR: Zei is the main character we follow in Chapter 2. The whole chapter is basically us following him around school and the city to see how this undercover, leaderless society actually functions when the pressure is on.

Just a matter of time. Soon they'll realize who Zei really is. The main character of Chapter 2 was never meant to stay in the shadows.

Soon everybody will know. And they'll wish they saw it sooner. $ZEI

Every day is a chance to stack smarter. Trust the process.

Sooner or later, people will realize why Vitalik wrote Zei the way he did. ZEI isn’t just a character in Chapter 2. It’s the embodiment of Ethereum’s original cypherpunk vision — decentralized coordination, anonymous infrastructure, and resilience under pressure. A leaderless network always survives longer than centralized power. Wouldn’t be surprised if Vitalik mentions ZEI again. The narrative is too real to ignore.

Most of the trenches don’t even know about Chapter 2 yet. They’re still hyper-fixated on Chapter 1. Soon they will realize. Zei is real. Zei is the main character of Chapter 2, building the Veridian world’s privacy & crypto systems from the shadows. Rule #1 of crypto: Never fade a Vitalik narrative. vitalik.eth.limo/w/html/ch2.html

Read Chapter 2 again and one thing became obvious: Zei keeps getting mentioned for a reason. That’s not random background writing anymore. Zei is slowly being positioned as one of the key characters in the story. The more you read, the more it feels like Vitalik is building toward something bigger. Wouldn’t be surprised if Zei gets directly mentioned by Vitalik soon. 👀 vitalik.eth.limo/w/html/ch2.html

@VitalikButerin Zei feels like one of the most important characters in your chapters Do you see Zei as a glimpse of Ethereum’s future culture… or a warning about where digital societies could eventually end up?

Updates since then: * Deepseek v4 is out. There *is* a 2-bit quant that can run within 90 GB ( huggingface.co/antirez/deepse… ), and it works, however it's only fast on Apple hardware (I've head ~35 tok/s). On AMD, it's ~7 tok/s. IMO actually taking the effort to properly support more than one hardware manufacturer is a great example of the difference between mere "decentralized AI" and genuine "CROPS AI". I hope we can become better at this. * github.com/vbuterin/messa… also has alpha telegram support now. However, the path to adding your account is quite janky * github.com/Luce-Org/luceb… looks promising as a way to run "dense" models (eg. Qwen 27B) more efficiently. It's janky, but on my 5090 laptop it seems to be ~2x more tok/s than llama.cpp * VoxTerm (local AI recording, no third-party servers) continues to be developed github.com/dmarzzz/VoxTerm And there's a lot more projects coming on the horizon. One other thing that has been on my mind is that there's actually a lot of intersection between "CROPS ethereum access layer" and "CROPS AI". For example, we want a ZK way to make (paid) calls to remote LLMs. But if we have this, then it's just as useful for solving another problem: private RPC reads in Ethereum. Another example: application-specific finetuned LLMs. Leanstral ( mistral.ai/news/leanstral ; I get ~38 tok/s on AMD) fits into < 70 GB, but can hold its own against 1T models on writing Lean code. Things like this are a huge boon for writing more secure code ( vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/0… ). We should have models finetuned for Ethereum-related use cases as well.

Thoughts: Vitalik is using fiction to beautifully illustrate the core tenets of cypherpunk culture: decentralized infrastructure, local resilience, and cryptography as a shield against centralized empires. If you haven't read Chapter 2 yet, it's highly recommended for anyone interested in network states and privacy tech. Catch up on the latest alpha here: vitalik.eth.limo/w/html/ch2.html

7/ The "Counter-Game" 🎲 But the Empire is too late. Thanks to anonymous cryptographic coordination, Dzego operates without exposed leaders or central points of failure. As Zei and his classmate Fin clean up the rubble of their bombed classroom, they defiantly declare: “Dze go ba fau gie” — Dzego will rise again.

If you’ve been tracking the narrative around Vitalik Buterin’s latest fiction chapter, you're looking at a masterclass in cyberpunk world-building. Beneath a simple story about a physics class lies the lore of Zei—a glimpse into a highly advanced, decentralized society fighting a silent, cryptographic war. Here is the breakdown of the lore behind Chapter 2. 👇

NEW: Vitalik announces he’s writing a sci-fi novel about decentralized governance.

We are literally sitting on pure, undervalued alpha and people are still fast asleep. Vitalik is out here cooking the actual thesis for the future, and Zei is already cemented as a main character in the script. Meanwhile, the rest of the market is stuck in the "wait, who?" phase. They are going to absolutely lose their minds and FOMO in later when Vitalik starts name-dropping Zei in every single blog post and keynote. Translation: We are so ridiculously early it’s actually criminal. Load your bags and position accordingly. 👀 Zei is real. Check it out here. vitalik.eth.limo/w/html/ch2.html

Zei appears as a character in Chapter 2 of vitalik.eth.limo, portrayed as one of the hidden architects behind the Veridian world. CA: 0xB50B38B6f7c8Fc0D0cBeDfEFbcf0b72cBa2a30a2 TG: t.me/zei_eth Chart: dexscreener.com/ethereum/0x73f…