What is a White Paper and How to Write it?
What is a White Paper?
Every Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in the market needs a White Paper for it to become a successful campaign.
A White Paper is a document that includes a summary of a problem that the project is trying to solve, the solution to that problem, as well as a detailed description of your product, its architecture, and its interaction with users.
In case you need more information: How to launch an ICO, a detailed guide
The content of any technical report should include the following discussion points (in no particular order), but should not be limited to these:
- Introduction
- Legal warning
- Table of Contents
- Description of the market and the problem
- Description of the product and how you will solve the problem
- Tokens: how many, why, how, when, etc.
- How the funds raised will be used
- The team
- The roadmap
How to Write a White Paper
The beginning of a white paper would also be a good section to place a legal notice or disclaimer, which should contain any important legal restrictions or notices. This may consist of exempting residents of certain countries from purchasing the project tokens due to local laws, or simply letting future investors know that the investment itself will not guarantee a return.
Perhaps one of the most important steps in writing almost any document is writing a compelling introduction. A good move would be to present the introduction in the form of a letter from a CEO addressing future token holders.
This section is where you need to describe the problem your project is trying to solve, providing an explanation of why this problem is important, and perhaps even touching on the consequences of not solving it.
This is where you need to grab the reader’s attention, explain the benefits of reading your document, and provide an overview of what they can expect from it. Use any available tool to do so: charts, graphs, etc.
A white paper is primarily a whitepaper and on average it can be around 25 pages. Therefore, it is extremely important to make your White Paper accessible and convenient for navigation. An informative and well-structured table of contents will definitely do a lot around here.
If your report contains some terms that you think need to be defined, you can create a glossary in the same section. Remember that investors may arrive who do not know so many terms of the crypto market and may feel a bit lost.
It may interest you: How to develop technical documents for an ICO: What to do and what not to do
Take as much space as you need to talk in-depth about your project and explain to potential investors exactly where it fits in today’s market. Most importantly, be sure to explain what the project is and what parts of it are.
Nobody really needs any of the numbers that you can include on the technical side unless they are backed by research, facts, or analysis.
1. Project status
This section should also contain a detailed description of the current state of the project: prototype data, first users if any, development strategy, and general objectives.
Most serious investors will only endorse projects that already have something to show for, as having an ecosystem and user base will increase the project token’s chances of survival in the market. If you have any of those items, make sure you clearly inform your readers about them.
2. Finance
Make sure to dedicate a large portion of your White Paper to project finances. You should be able to clearly explain why your project needs its own tokens, how and when they will be distributed exactly, if the number of tokens for the ICO will be limited, when the market sales will start, etc. Popularly this term is known as “Tokenomics” since it refers to the economics applicable to tokens.
3. Funds Use Plan
Investors need to know exactly where their money will go and how much money the project will need to complete certain important tasks.
Most importantly, the White Paper should not mention spending items such as “networking events”, “industry development”, “miscellaneous”, etc. Your White Paper should clearly state that all money raised will be spent on development issues and nothing else.
4. Road Map
Finally, the White Paper should include not only a detailed technical description of the project but also a development roadmap. Ideally, a detailed work plan for the next 12-24 months should be submitted and include at least one beta release with its respective tentative date.
If some of the tasks outlined in the roadmap have already been completed, be sure to clearly state this in the white paper as investors will find this a great advantage.
The team is an integral and crucial part of the project and must be presented as such. With rare exceptions, an ICO with anonymous developers will be successful. In fact, many consider that when a project does not show who the developers are, it is a full-blown scam.
While the rest of the White Paper should be a technical description, this particular section is where the human touch is essential. Photos, short biographies of the development team, and links to their social networks will be highly regarded by investors.
Make sure you not only describe who the people behind your project are, but also explain why they are so important to this particular project, and why these people will make it work.
Be sure to specify how your previous experience will be useful for this project. If any of the team members have had experience with projects related to blockchain or cryptocurrencies, be sure to state this clearly.
Also, you can say a few words about the project advisors. However, be sure to avoid mentioning nonsensical names, as the consultants mentioned should be more or fewer experts in what the projects set out to accomplish. It is also important that you make sure that these consultants are really willing to be included in your project, a situation in which an expert comes out publicly saying that he has no relationship with your project, despite being mentioned in the White Paper, it can make a very bad impression on the public.
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Style, Language, and Design
When preparing a white paper, be sure to use formal, almost academic writing. The document should be very descriptive and professional in tone. Your focus should be narrow, as it is better to choose a topic and focus on it.
Too often, white paper authors tend to ramble on possible use cases and possible future implementations of their technology, rather than focus on what is truly important.
If you intend to sell party hats via Blockchain, please do not write about your intention to introduce personalization services in cooperation with another start-up by 2024, or about the possibility of also starting to accumulate hats and caps “in the near future. “. Focus on your goal, integrate party hats on Blockchain. Focus on how the offered tokens will be used to upgrade the party hats, how you might get a new rope or a new paint job for them.
Also, and it goes without saying, be sure to check your White Paper for grammar and spelling errors, as well as to check everything you can. The text throughout the document should be formatted properly so that it does not look unprofessional.
Apart from the above-mentioned, if you want to be able to present your documentation in several languages, it is better to opt for the help of a professional translator, which should only cost between $ 150 and $ 200 for a 25-page document. Do not seek to “save” the use of an official translator by using the web pages that do automatic translations, mistakes can be made and that can cause a bad image in investors.
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Where to Publish the White Paper
A few years ago, there were cases of successful ICO campaigns that only published the White Paper in various forums related to Bitcoin. These days, ICOs have become a bit more “technical” and formal, which has led to most projects opting to publish their White Paper on their website.
Other options, like GitHub, forums, etc. they are still viable, but you need to make sure there is a single central point of access to your white paper. Avoid copying and pasting on multiple different platforms, instead, you can simply post a link when promoting your project on different forums and websites.
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ICO White Paper Templates
As with any other semi-complicated business-related documentation, there are numerous white paper templates available online. In general, the use of such templates is frowned upon by both the crypto community and investors. If you are preparing a quality product that is unique, you should spend time on a unique white paper.
As ICOs become increasingly popular, the number of freelancers offering to write a White Paper for promising startups has been increasing exponentially, and it can apparently cost as little as $ 100. However, this should not even be considered an option for a project that hopes to be seriously considered in the market.
At the end of the day, the White Paper is your main selling point. It is the unique vision of the product that your team has and should be treated seriously. Saving money on hiring a freelancer to do this job can only lead to an inferior result and consequently not obtaining the necessary funds.
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Alternative Modalities to White Papers
If you are guiding yourself by what other ICOs have done, it is sure that you have seen concepts such as “One-Pager” or “Yellow Paper”. What do these mean? They are optional documents that they develop in ICO campaigns that complement the information that is in the White Paper.
1. One Pager
It is a document that seeks to present the White Paper in the most summarized way possible. As its name indicates, it is intended to be a one-page document, two at most. Why is such a short document created? There are investors who do not have enough time to read an entire technical White Paper, they want to go to the concrete and that is why they need a document that is concrete and direct, they need to read a One Pager.
2. Yellow paper
In the world of ICOs, there are projects that pose really complex issues at a technological level, and, being so, they need to explain very well the technical details of what they hope to develop. Algorithms and technical documentation are what we are usually going to see in this type of documentation.
Do I need Yellow Paper? Many ICOs have come up with very good ideas when they are in the campaign, but the unfortunate thing is that they are only left with ideas. When they go to the real shot, many are faced with the reality that they do not have the technical preparation to carry out the project.
Amid these failures, investors have started to demand these documents, especially those who are already familiar with the world of cryptocurrencies. What they hope to evaluate with this is to determine if the team has the technical capacity necessary to successfully develop the project.
If we want to see a successful Yellow Paper we can visualize Ethereum and evaluate how they have explained the more technical details of their network.
3. Beige Paper
This document is very rare to see in the ICO market, but some projects have sought to present it to investors. This is a less technical and complex Yellow Paper so that it can be read by a wider and less tech-savvy audience. As mentioned above, very few projects write this document for their ICO campaign.
Examples of White Papers of Successful Projects
Some of the Examples of Well-Written White Papers and Successful ICOs Include:
- Ethereum – $ 15,500,000 raised
- Dragon Coin – $ 320,000,000 raised
- EOS – $ 4,190,000,000 raised
Honorable mention: Ethereum Useless – A joke ICO with perhaps the shortest White Paper in the world, consisting of several sentences written on its website, accompanied by the tagline “Seriously, don’t buy these tokens.” Amazingly, it raised $ 95,430 and some 310,445 Ethers through the “most honest ICO in the world.”