Whitepapers
The founding documents of the major cryptocurrencies — the original papers where each project first laid out its design, cryptography, and goals. Read each one in your browser or download the PDF.
Layer 1 (2)
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
The founding document of Bitcoin — a peer-to-peer electronic cash system built on a proof-of-work chain that solves double-spending without a trusted third party.
Satoshi Nakamoto · 2008 · 9 pp
Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain
The Solana whitepaper introducing Proof of History — a verifiable delay function that orders events in time, enabling a high-throughput single-chain architecture.
Anatoly Yakovenko · 2017 · 14 pp
Privacy (2)
CryptoNote v 2.0
The CryptoNote whitepaper that underpins Monero — ring signatures and one-time keys that make transactions untraceable by default on a PoW chain.
Nicolas van Saberhagen · 2013 · 14 pp
Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin
The academic paper behind Zcash — zk-SNARKs that hide sender, recipient, and amount while preserving a public, auditable supply on a Bitcoin-derived chain.
Eli Ben-Sasson et al. · 2014 · 36 pp
Platform (1)
Payments (1)
Can’t find one?
Not every cryptocurrency has a formal whitepaper — some (like Ethereum and Dogecoin) were introduced through forum posts, wiki pages, or announcements rather than a single canonical PDF. We only list whitepapers that exist as an original downloadable document.