Whitepaper

A whitepaper is the founding technical document a crypto project publishes to explain what it is building, how the system works and what assumptions it depends on. The format traces back to the 2008 Bitcoin paper, which set out a peer-to-peer electronic cash design in nine pages with no marketing and no team page. Later projects stretched the label to cover token sale prospectuses of very different quality. A useful whitepaper is specific about the consensus and security model, the token's role in the system, and the known limitations; a weak one substitutes roadmaps, partnership logos and yield figures for engineering detail. Because nobody vets these documents before publication, a whitepaper is a starting point for research, not evidence that the described system exists.