Crypto History

The Whitepaper Library

Every revolution starts with a paper. Here are the original documents behind the biggest cryptocurrencies, presented in full with the story of why each one matters. Read the words that started it all.

New to whitepapers? Start with the reading guideHow to read a crypto whitepaper: the abstract, the problem, the design, and the green flags that mark the serious projects.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

The 2008 paper that introduced peer to peer electronic cash and the blockchain.

Satoshi Nakamoto · October 31, 2008 Ethereum

Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform

The 2014 paper that proposed a blockchain with a built in programming language for smart contracts.

Vitalik Buterin · 2014 Solana

Solana: A New Architecture for a High Performance Blockchain

The 2017 paper that introduced proof of history, a shared clock for making blockchains fast.

Anatoly Yakovenko · 2017 Cardano

Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol

The academic paper behind Ouroboros, the first proof of stake protocol with a formal security proof.

Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David, Roman Oliynykov · 2017 (revised ePrint 2019) Polkadot

Polkadot: Vision for a Heterogeneous Multi-Chain Framework

The 2016 paper that laid out a network of many blockchains sharing security.

Dr. Gavin Wood · October 2016 Avalanche

Scalable and Probabilistic Leaderless BFT Consensus through Metastability

The paper family that introduced a new way for large networks to agree quickly and securely.

Team Rocket, Maofan Yin, Kevin Sekniqi, Robbert van Renesse, Emin Gun Sirer · 2018 (paper family; this text the 2019 arXiv revision) Chainlink

ChainLink: A Decentralized Oracle Network

The 2017 paper that brought real world data to smart contracts through decentralized oracles.

Steve Ellis, Ari Juels, Sergey Nazarov · September 2017 Uniswap

Uniswap Whitepaper (v1)

The 2018 paper that described automated token swaps through liquidity pools.

Hayden Adams · November 2018 Monero

CryptoNote v2.0 (the paper Monero is built on)

The 2013 CryptoNote paper that made private, untraceable digital cash possible.

Nicolas van Saberhagen · October 2013 Cosmos

Cosmos: A Network of Distributed Ledgers

The 2016 paper that proposed an internet of independent blockchains talking to each other.

Jae Kwon, Ethan Buchman · 2016 Tezos

Tezos: A Self-Amending Crypto-Ledger (Position Paper)

The 2014 position paper that proposed a blockchain able to upgrade itself through on chain voting.

L.M. Goodman · September 2014 Stellar

The Stellar Consensus Protocol: A Federated Model for Internet-Level Consensus

The paper that introduced federated agreement for fast, low cost payments.

David Mazieres · 2015 Ripple

The Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm

The 2014 paper that described how the XRP ledger reaches agreement through trusted validator lists.

David Schwartz, Noah Youngs, Arthur Britto · 2014 Zcash

Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (extended version)

The 2014 paper that brought fully private transactions to a public blockchain with zero knowledge proofs.

Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, Madars Virza · May 2014

A note on Dogecoin

Dogecoin launched in December 2013 as a lighthearted fork of Litecoin, and its story lives in forum posts, memes, and the code itself. The community chose culture over a formal whitepaper, so this library honors Dogecoin here while the papers above carry the formal founding documents.

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