What Is a White Paper?

• Whitepapers explain the purpose and technology behind a project.
• They usually provide statistics, diagrams and facts to convince interested investors to purchase the cryptocurrency.
• Producing a whitepaper is key a step required for a crypto startup to be considered legitimate and professional, as it helps investors understand how a business is different from rivals in the space.
• Whitepapers differ from litepapers, which tend to be shorter, less technical and easier to understand.
• One of the most famous cryptocurrency whitepapers is undoubtedly Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which was published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.

The Bitcoin whitepaper proposed the following:

• A peer-to-peer (P2P) system for payments across an online network
• Removing third parties and replacing them with verification (decentralization)
• Transactions would be irreversible
• A P2P distributed timestamp server. This would generate mathematical proof of an order of different transactions.