Decrypting the Future of Crypto White Papers

09 Feb 2020 by rate3

Reading and reviewing more than 200 white papers during the past several years makes me believe that WPs are here to stay.

However, after they have evolved from PhDs papers to BIPs a lot has changed and WPs have mutated into several subspecies, some more darwinistically successful than others.

First-gen ICO's WPs (f.e. Tezos, Ethereum) are almost instinct. Very few has time to rumble through jungles of CS slang and heavy math.

Second-gen (like the above-mentioned Theta), which "lightens" its content and add to it resumes, market analysis and business models is more prevalent now. Those start to look more and more like old-school "business plans".

Third-gen (f.e. Tellor) make WPs dynamic and short but trivial.

Another tendency is to have several WPs treating devs, VCs and private investors (public) separately. Nonetheless, writing and updating several WPs remains very time consuming. Not many do that.

What Michael has mentioned might become a thing of the future, when the process of DLT projects / comps communication with the world is bundled into an app (might be on-chained too).

However, in our age of dominance of gigantic centralized silos discovery remains the major issue and I doubt that many entrepreneurs will step out from traditional formats of blogging, twittering and youtubing WPs content anytime soon.

Consequently, WPs will, probably, remain much more an art (of attracting attention and money) than a precise science (of providing us with specs, facts and data) for quite a some time.