— Bitcoin // BTC // Proof of Work // Satoshi Nakamoto*
*unknown if this is a real person, a group, or a pseudonym
— Litecoin // LTC // Proof of Work // Charlie Lee
— Namecoin // NMC // Proof of Work // Vincent Durham
— Peercoin // PPC // Proof of Work & Proof of Stake // Scott Nadal & Sunny King*
*possible pseudonym
— Dogecoin // DOGE // Proof of Work // Jackson Palmer & Billy Markus
— Gridcoin // GRC // Decentralized Proof of Stake // Rob Hälford
— Primecoin // XPM // Proof of Work // Sunny King*
— Ripple // XRP // Consensus // Chris Larsen & Jed McCaleb
— Nxt // NXT // Proof of Stake // BCNext
*possible pseudonym
— Auroracoin // AUR // Proof of Work // Baldur Odinsson*
— Dash // DASH // Proof of Work & Proof of Service // Evan Duffield & Kyle Hagan
— MazaCoin // MZC // Proof of Work // BTC Oyate Initiative
— Monero // XMR // Proof of Work // Monero Core Team
— NEO // NEO // Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance // Da Hongfei & Erik Zhang
— Stellar // XLM // Stellar Consensus Protocol // Jed McCaleb
— Titcoin // TIT // Proof of Work // Edward Mansfield & Richard Allen
— Verge // XVG // Proof of Work // Sunerok
— Vertcoin // VTC // Proof of Work // David Muller
*possible pseudonym
— Ethereum // ETH // Proof of Work & Proof of Stake // Vitalik Buterin & Gavin Wood
— Ethereum Classic // ETC // Proof of Work // Vitalik Buterin & Gavin Wood
— Nano // Nano // Open Representative Voting // Colin LeMahieu
— Tether // USDT // Proof of Work // Jan Ludovicus van der Velde
— Firo // FIRO // Proof of Work // Poramin Insom
— VeChain // VET // Proof of Stake & Proof of Authority // Sunny Lu
— Zcash // ZEC // Proof of Work // Zooko Wilcox
— Binance Coin // BNB // Proof of Staked Authority // Binance
— Bitcoin Cash // BCH // Proof of Work // Craig Wright
— Cardano // ADA // Proof of Stake // Charles Hoskinson
— EOS.IO // EOS // Delegated Proof of Stake // Dan Larimer
— Polygon // MATIC // Plasma & Proof of Stake // Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun
— Polkadot // DOT // Nominated Proof of Stake // Gavin Wood
— TRON // TRX // Proof of Stake // Justin Sun
— Axie Infinity // AXS // Proof of Work // Trung Nguyen & Aleksander Larsen
— Crypto.com Coin // CRO // Tendermint Byzantine Fault Tolerance // Monaco*
— Uniswap // UNI // Proof of Stake // Hayden Adams
— USD Coin // USDC // Stablecoin // Centre
*pseudonym
— Algorand // ALGO // Proof of Stake // Silvio Micali
— Binance USD // BUSD // fiat-backed Stablecoin // Paxos
— Chainlink // LINK // Proof of Stake // Sergey Nazarov, Steve Ellis, Dr. Ari Juels
— FTX Token // FTT // Proof of Stake // Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang
— Solana // SOL // Proof of Stake & Proof of History // Anatoly Yakovenko
— Terra // LUNA // Delegated Proof of Stake; Tendermint // Terraform Labs
— Avalanche // AVAX // Avalanche Consensus // Emin Gün Sirer
— Decentraland // MANA // Delegated Proof of Token Ownership // Decentraland Foundation
— Shiba Inu // SHIB // Proof of Stake // Ryoshi
— DeSo // DESO // Proof of Work // Nader al-Naji
— SafeMoon // SAFEMOON // Proof of Work // SafeMoon LLC
— Internet Computer // ICP // Proof of Stake // Dominic Williams

NOTABLE WHITEPAPERS

[chronological order]

Ralph C. Merkle
December 14, 1979 — Whitepaper
Patent // Method of Providing Digital Signatures
tl;dr // Foundational blockchain technology. In cryptography and computer science, a Merkle tree [hash tree] allows efficient and secure verification of the contents of a large data structure.
David Chaum
February 1981 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // a technique based on public key cryptography that allows an electronic mail system to hide who a participant communicates with as well as the content of the communication - in spite of an unsecured underlying telecommunication system
Stuart Haber & W. Scott Stornetta
February 1991 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..computationally practical procedures for digital time-stamping of such documents so that it is infeasible for a user either to back-date or to forward-date their document, even with the collusion of a time-stamping service. Our procedures maintain complete privacy of the documents themselves, and require no record-keeping by the time-stamping service.”
Cynthia Dwork & Moni Naor
1993 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..main idea is to require a user to compute a moderately hard, but not intractable, function in order to gain access to the resource, thus preventing frivolous use. To this end we suggest several pricing functions, based on, respectively, extracting square roots modulo a prime, the Fiat-Shamir signature scheme, and the Ong-Schnorr-Shamir signature scheme.”
Nick Szabo
1994 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “A smart contract is a computerized transaction protocol that executes the terms of a contract. The general objectives of smart contract design are to satisfy common contractual conditions, minimize exceptions both malicious and accidental, and minimize the need for trusted intermediaries. Related economic goals include lowering fraud loss, arbitration & enforcement costs, and other transaction costs.”
Satoshi Nakamoto
2009 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.“
Vitalik Buterin
2013 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “Protocols around decentralized file storage, decentralized computation and decentralized prediction markets, among dozens of other such concepts, have the potential to substantially increase the efficiency of the computational industry, and provide a massive boost to other peer-to-peer protocols by adding for the first time an economic layer.”
Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, Madars Virza
2014 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..we construct a full-fledged ledger-based digital currency with strong privacy guarantees. Our results leverage recent advances in zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge [zk-SNARKs].”
L.M Goodman
September 2, 2014 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “Tezos can instantiate any blockchain based ledger. The operations of a regular blockchain are implemented as a purely functional module abstracted into a shell responsible for network operations. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptonote, etc. can all be represented within Tezos by implementing the proper interface to the network layer. Most importantly, Tezos supports meta upgrades: the protocols can evolve by amending their own code.”
Robert Sams
October 24, 2014 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..next-generation cryptocurrencies should incorporate an elastic supply rule that adjust the quantity of coin supply proportionately to changes in coin market value.”
Joseph Poon & Thaddeus Dryja
January 14, 2016 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “A decentralized system is proposed whereby transactions are sent over a network of micropayment channels whose transfer of value occurs off-blockchain. If Bitcoin transactions can be signed with a new sighash type that addresses malleability, these transfers may occur between untrusted parties along the transfer route by contracts which are enforceable via broadcast over the bitcoin blockchain through a series of decrementing timelocks.”
David Mazieres
February 25, 2016 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..a new model for consensus called Federated Byzantine Agreement. FBA achieves robustness through quorum slices — individual trust decisions made by each node that together determine system-level quorums. Slices bind the system together much the way individual networks’ peering and transit decisions now unify the Internet. We also present the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), a construction for FBA.”
Jing Chen & Silvio Micali
2017 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..a truly democratic and efficient way to implement a public ledger. Unlike prior implementations based on proof of work, it requires a negligible amount of computation, and generates a transaction history that will not fork with overwhelmingly high probability. Algorand is based on [a novel and super fast] message-passing Byzantine agreement.”
Anatoly Yakovenko
2017 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..a new blockchain architecture based on Proof of History [PoH] - a proof for verifying order and passage of time between events. PoH is used to encode trustless passage of time into a ledger - an append only data structure. This paper also proposes two algorithms that leverage the time keeping properties of the PoH ledger - a PoS algorithm, and an efficient streaming Proof of Replication [PoRep]. The combination of PoRep and PoH provides a defense against ledger forgery with respect to time and storage.”
Joseph Poon & Vitalik Buterin
August 11, 2017 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..a method for decentralized autonomous applications to scale to process not only financial activity, but also construct economic incentives for globally persistent data services, which may produce an alternative to centralized server farms.”
Enjin PTE LTD
September 26, 2017 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “A decentralized platform to manage, distribute, and trade virtual goods. Giving gamers and content creators a new model of virtual ownership.”
The Maker Team
December 2017 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “The Dai Stablecoin is a collateral-backed cryptocurrency whose value is stable relative to the US Dollar. We believe that stable digital assets like Dai Stablecoin are essential to realizing the full potential of blockchain technology. Maker enables anyone to leverage their Ethereum assets to generate Dai on the Maker Platform. Once generated, Dai can be used in the same manner as any other cryptocurrency: it can be freely sent to others, used as payments for goods and services, or held as long term savings. Importantly, the generation of Dai also creates the components needed for a robust decentralized margin trading platform.”
Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David, Roman Oliynykov
July 20, 2019 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “We present “Ouroboros,” the first blockchain protocol based on proof of stake with rigorous security guarantees. As the protocol provides a “proof of stake” blockchain discipline, it offers qualitative efficiency advantages over blockchains based on proof of physical resources [Proof of Work]. We also present a novel reward mechanism for incentivizing proof of stake protocols and we prove that, given this mechanism, honest behavior is an approximate Nash equilibrium, thus neutralizing attacks such as selfish mining.”
Hayden Adams, Noah Zinsmeister, & Dan Robinson
March 2020 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “..new features—including arbitrary pairs between ERC20s, a hardened price oracle that allows other contracts to estimate the time-weighted average price over a given interval, “flash swaps” that allow traders to receive assets and use them elsewhere before paying for them later in the transaction, and a protocol fee that can be turned on in the future. It also re-architects the contracts to reduce their attack surface.”
Lorenz Breidenbach, Christian Cachin, Benedict Chan, Alex Coventry, Steve Ellis, Ari Juels, Farinaz Koushanfar, Andrew Miller, Brendan Magauran, Daniel Moroz, Sergey Nazarov, Alexandru Topliceanu, Florian Tram`er, Fan Zhang
April 15, 2021 — Whitepaper
tl;dr // “A Decentralized Oracle Network thus acts as a powerful abstraction layer, offering interfaces for smart contracts to extensive off-chain resources and highly efficient yet decentralized off-chain computing resources within the DON itself.”

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improve this guide = help others

cryptoPeter HullNovember 22, 2021crypto, journalism, nft, resource, whitepaper

The Researcher's Guide to Crypto

FOR JOURNALISTS, STUDENTS & CURIOUS HUMANS RESEARCHING BLOCKCHAIN & CRYPTOCURRENCY

LEARN

DATA

nft

Visual Resources

TOKEN TIMELINE

2009

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

NOTABLE WHITEPAPERS

A Certified Digital Signature

Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, & Digital Pseudonyms

How to Timestamp a Digital Document

Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail

Smart Contracts

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform

Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments From Bitcoin

Tezos — a self-amending crypto-ledger

A Note On Cryptocurrency Stabilisation: Seigniorage Shares

The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments

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

Algorand

Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain v0.8.13

Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

Enjin Coin: Smart Cryptocurrency for Gaming

The Dai Stablecoin System

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

Uniswap v2 Core

Chainlink 2.0: Next Steps in the Evolution of Decentralized Oracle Networks

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