I've gone through a bunch of whitepapers over the last few months. Started with Bitcoin's, which I first encountered back in 2018 during a crypto/blockchain course. They actually demonstrated a proof of work algorithm using Python. Recently, I've also checked out whitepapers from Solana, Ethereum, Render (an AI token on ETH), and some memecoins that actually took the time to write one up. It’s kind of cool to see even meme projects treating it seriously.
So here's what I think should be included:
A project introduction or summary
Technical specifics like the consensus protocol and algorithms
Tokenomics details (like how liquidity is managed, total coins minted, how many are held by creators, how many will be burned, etc.)
Additional info to persuade potential investors and users to get involved
Did I get this right? If there's anything I might've overlooked, let me know!
You mentioned being impressed by memecoin whitepapers. Honey, thats like being impressed that a stripper told you her real name. Its part of the fantasy. A memecoin whitepaper is just "Technical Fan Fiction." They use big words like "deflationary hyper-burn" to distract you from the fact that the coin has the utility of a chocolate teapot.
And I love seeing the Team section in these whitepapers. Its usually just a bunch of guys in hoodies claiming they once worked at big companies. We call it the "Trust Me, Bro" part. LOL!
I think what you've missed is the question what makes you excited about memecoins.
It's because not many of us are excited with them anymore and we're barely reading them. Maybe, we're also past with that and that's why it doesn't interest us anymore.
While all of those you've mentioned about what it contains are likely it is, I think that you're really interested in investing to memecoins.
This is general outline indeed.
Whitepaper is supposedly to be good and full of technical knowledge like bitcoin's whitepaper. But nowadays developer just put whatever they think fit inside the whitepaper.
The fact that even meme coin have whitepaper means there's something wrong. Are they presenting their ultimate meme of the year or what? doesn't make sense to me.
But overall, bitcoin's whitepaper is what a crypto project's whitepaper should be. Talking about the real solution to a problem not just overly focusing on tokenomic and how the developers can mint token out of thin air.
Replace the Introducing the project in a summary/brief with usability and what the project is trying to solve. This is the most important; without it, the project is just average.
The whitepaper should convince readers that it has something to offer the cryptocurrency industry as a whole, and it's something unique.
Investors want to be an early bird on a unique project; if it's something new, expect strong support.
Points you made are correct, but they're not specific. The industry already has millions of crypto projects, but only a few are truly making a difference. You can't offer potential investors the nonsense that your project is the same as Ethereum (ETH) which uses PoS consensus or it has great scalability like the Solana (SOL) network. So, in WP, your project must have differences in the form of value proposition, offering something that makes sense to those investors.
About the first part, thanks for clarifying the whitepaper for me. For the rest, completely agreed. I personally like SOL because of the exact point of being really scalable. Also I am interested in TON and its good children (Telegram Stars, STON, something which offer a real value) and they're just a "currency" for Telegram's ecosystem which has a real-world value. I guess a new token/coin may have this type of value to have investors convinced.
What you explain, makes me think about whitepapers like a really detailed pitch deck which has the goal of convincing early birds and investors.
Well, I'm just interested in those because it gives me a feeling of they took the project seriously. Otherwise, the only "memecoin" I've ever traded was DOGE. I guess at this point, it's not considered a meme anymore and it is one of the leaders of the industry.
I remember when I finished reading it, one of my friends - who was working in a local CEX - recommended reading Cardano's WP as well. I told her I'm reading ETH's now, and I haven't read Cardano's despite years being passed from that they. I don't know why she recommended that particular one, but a while after this conversation, I remember Chia made a hype. I read that one as well. It also was a good and well-detailed one.
And about memes having a whitepaper, I explained in the next one why I may like them. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong myself.
Fun fact, I've never met a striper in my life Jokes aside, I read one of them which was for bonk on TON which was a copy of bonk which is originally on SOL. They just explained how they got impressed by that and the only person mentioned was the original minter and not a team.
Although, you've made a very good point. Fact checking of someone working on a large company - specially in a memecoin context - is something no one wastes time on. However, I'm still feeling it would make even a meme project much more trustworthy compared to other ones.
Sad fact is that we do not read whitepapers anymore. Surely do write something decent in case anyone reads it so that you do not get bad marketing and crash, but there are people who do this kind of work, they write whitepaper and they have proof of work from previous ones they wrote and if you find someone who wrote for a project that had good marketcap before, then you can pay them to do this.
If you can't afford to hire a writer to do a whitepaper for you then you should not start a project anyways, because starting a new token/coin requires a huge capital, if you do not have it then you are going to just not get funded and crash in the end.
But a good white paper requires much more than that. A solid white paper does not just talk about unrealistic dream it clearly explain what problem it solves and how significant that problem is.
In my opinion instead of creating false hype it is crucial to include how this technology will work in real life. A realistic roadmap is also essential to understand when the project will be launched. Adding detailed profiles of the team members and advisors significantly increases credibility. Any potential legal issue or risk should also be disclosed upfront
If you put big money into a project, you'd need to read the whitepaper. It's not matter of whether you want to read or not but you need to figure out if the project is a real deal or just another failure brewing.
You can just use LLM for this and get summarize in simple paragraphs to figure out the inner of the whitepaper.
Even you can figure out if a project is scam or not from just reading their whitepaper because if the whitepaper is just another plagiarism with nonsense parroting, big fat chance the project is a scam.
Before you even think about what to put in a whitepaper you have to fist ask who is your target audience. That will determine what they want to read.
For example in case of Bitcoin the target audience were people interested in innovation and the technology. So if you read the bitcoin paper, it doesn't mention details like supply and other stuff you mentioned in your third bullet point. Satoshi introduced Bitcoin the technology not Bitcoin the coin you buy to get rich!
Now compared with shittokens, the audience is very different. The token creators want to get people into buying their useless product promising them "returns" so they keep talking about "tokenomics" and how their shittoken is going to go up in price!
So you have to decide on your audience first and then choose something between Bitcoin to Shittokens and write your paper.
This is pretty similar to start a new startup company then (and I guess it is the same, isn't it?) and this is like who is target audience of Instagram compared to the target audience of Uber for example. I got it. This also needs that "validation" phase of pretty much every idea. Like interviews or something like that.
First bold part, agreed. If you want to put like $100K in something, it makes absolute sense to read the whitepaper and even hire someone to analyze it. About second one, be aware of that hallucinations and also LLM's mostly say what you want to hear not the truth and you have to tune your prompt in a way that LLM just skips that phase and tells you the truth brutally.
The false hype is part of any new technology unfortunately. I am an AI engineer myself and I deal with teams claiming they're making LLM's fine-tuned on specific tasks. They send me "model cards" including the data like "Hey, look, we're awesome" and it remembers me of a famous Persian proverb No grocer will say I sell sour yogurt which means no one says what we're doing is bad. And I'm sure there are more people like this in crypto world since non-technical people are more interested in crypto.
The roadmap, profiles of team members, etc. It makes me more and more sure that a whitepaper is basically a very well-detailed pitch deck or manual on your crypto project or company.
First, I have no intention of making any coin or service. But in terms of hiring, I have a couple of friends who work in crypto/web3 companies. They're ready to help (and they offered their expertise) and there is no problem in paying a hire for a simple project. However, I still think having a well-detailed and well-written whitepaper (even if you do it using a free-tier ChatGPT) is a green flag for a serious projects, even if you don't read it. You always can read it and find out the problems or flaws in the project if there is something wrong with the project.
Yep you got the main beats a big thing to watch for is the use case and problem statement does the whitepaper clearly explain why this token needs to exist? a lot of them just describe how it works without a good why also check the governance part how do token holders actually influence decisions? That's often glossed over
I don't recommend using a free-tier ChatGPT; even a premium one is not recommended. Using AI to write a whitepaper is not recommended because it will not be unique. I have seen so many projects get busted because of duplicate content from other projects.
A well-written, detailed project is a red flag if it is copied from other projects.
You covered the core points quite well.
In addition to what you listed, I would also consider:
a clear problem statement and target audience,
real-world use cases (not only theoretical),
roadmap with realistic milestones,
governance or decision-making model (if applicable),
legal / regulatory disclaimer depending on jurisdiction.
A good whitepaper should focus more on clarity and transparency than on marketing.
Most whitepapers from memecoins are plagiarized, they copy and paste from other projects and implement them as if they were their own whitepapers, but they are not --- you can see hundreds of newly launched crypto projects in the past plagiarized.
Maybe now with the existence of AI they can create with that tool for whitepapers --- once I say they are not experts in making this just claiming it, the rest just wants to from making memecoins.
Not only memecoin --- tokens that have usecases that have whitepapers are still plagiarizing a lot of this including the concept of token utilities and web concepts.
It is not that weird that people do not read whitepapers anymore. Simple reason is that you can have chatgpt write one for you, you could ask for the most detailed whitepaper in the world and get a 240 pages long whitepaper, obviously not all once because chatgpt doesn't write that long easily, but you can do piece by piece, page by page and it will give you something that will be the best whitepaper in the world.
Doesn't mean you won't scam people, so people don't care about whitepaper at all, they care if a project is trustworthy or not. Whitepaper is just a snapshot on real life utility which may help devs to convince investors to come forward but guaranteeing nothing about the future of the project.
Well, as someone who worked on model development for years (even before GPT's becoming a thing, working on YOLO and other types of models) I'd say everything is depending on the user. The context, the tools, even the writing style or something like that. In general, you have to make sure you have enough background of the subject, then get AI involved.
I will take it to consideration. Currently working on something which requires a whitepaper.
Well the copycat problem is pretty much everywhere. Specially when it has money involved. I believe there is a parallel platform to pump.fun which lists the successful tokens from pump.fun and lets you copy them. Well, they just made a platform for performing rugpulls and I even saw people make video on the topic on YouTube. It's really a messed up reality but I guess the only thing I personally can do is to spread information about how most projects on these platforms are fake and people must not fall for shillers on X or YouTube or Telegram.
Well, it reminds me of one of my automation workflows, it really is one of my absolute favorites I made. It connects to an API, takes different markdown files and turn them into well-formatted and well-written documents. I mostly use if for business proposals or code docs. But I believe it can be used on other types of docs as well.
your nearly closer to be doomed, don't be impress on whitepaper like for example meme coins, they can say whatever they want, they can even promise the world, but at the end of the day, they can break it, for meme coin some will just get all the money by selling the tokens and then disappear leaving investors who are impress with the content of the whitepaper, stay away from meme coin, this is a warning, we've been there and you wont like what is going to happen, if they run.