Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has launched an unusual experiment to test how far artificial intelligence can penetrate online anonymity. In a post on X, he revealed that he once wrote a document under a pseudonym and invited the public and AI researchers to try to identify it.
Buterin said the text is of “medium importance,” was written sometime between 2020 and 2026, and is one of hundreds to thousands of publications linked to the Ethereum ecosystem. “I am willing to sacrifice some of my anonymity for the sake of the experiment,” he wrote, saying the goal is to see how well stylometry can reveal a hidden author.
The challenge is notable because Buterin has an unusually large writing sample, including millions of words in blog posts, technical papers and forum discussions. That gives machine learning models a broad base to analyze writing patterns, sentence structure and vocabulary in an effort to match anonymous texts to the same author.
The experiment comes amid wider concern that AI tools could undermine pseudonymity online. In crypto, pseudonymity is central to how many users, from developers to investors, operate, but advanced text analysis may weaken that protection. Buterin framed the exercise as a stress test for those anonymity systems, and so far no one has proven they identified the document. He has also said he is shifting some of his focus away from technical essays toward a science-fiction novel, “Veridia,” about decentralized governance, quadratic voting and AI in decision-making, with two chapters already posted on his personal site.
