Vitalik releases the 32-chapter Snowmoon manga, licensed under GPL v3

On September 27, PANews reported that Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, said on the X platform: "The 32-chapter work I created personally for Snowmoon was completed by me. The text is written entirely by myself; Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next are only used for editing and consistency checks; it's open source under GPL v3; video or animation adaptations require an open source process while sharing AI tools and license boundaries".

Vitalk, Snowmoon, GPL v3, AI creation and other open source content

32 chapters completed, AI only involved in editing

On September 27th, PANews reported that Vitalik released Snowmoon related news: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on the X platform that his personally created 32-chapter work titled "Snow Moon" had been completed. According to the description, the text was written entirely by him, Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next were only used for editing and consistency checking.

GPL v3 extends from code to content

The GPL v3 is commonly understood as an open-source software license, and its core requirement is that derivative works continue to be available in the same way. Placing Snowmoon under this agreement means that a work is no longer just plain readable but also incorporated into a set of rules that can be reused, modified and redistributed.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has long been at the center of public discussions in the crypto industry. Personal creation does not necessarily have an industrial connotation, but this illustrates putting two questions on the table simultaneously: whether AI is involved in generating text and how it can be modified after its release. The answers are broken down into verifiable boundaries: the original text was written by him/herself, with AI used for editing and consistency checking; modification requires open source processes.

Signals for transparency in content production

In contexts where AI tools are widely used, it is increasingly difficult to tell who writes the text and who does the editing. Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next were specifically listed as being limited in their use for editing and consistency checking, which was clearer than admitting that they had used an AI tag. It refers to processes such as coloring, terminology unification, and paragraph linkage rather than directly generating the original text.

Open source licenses are common in software projects, and now used for chapter-based works that may also incorporate content creation into a traceable, redistributable framework. For the general reader this means that when you see subsequent secondary work it is possible to ask whether it complies with GPL v3, as well as whether the modification process is publicly available.

Follow-up

Next, it's worth paying attention to how the chapters of Snowmoon are read and disseminated, as well as how GPL v3 is actually implemented in creative scenarios such as text, video or animation. The open-source clause may reduce uncertainty about secondary creations and increase compliance costs. For crypto industry readers, whether these types of individual projects will continue using open source licenses will be a window into the relationship between creators and AI tools.