How Blockchain Whitepapers Became Worldbuilding Documents

\ Author's note: This essay is adapted from Dreaming Systems , my ongoing memoir about blockchain, technological optimism, and the futures we imagined before they existed. -- In 2017, my inbox changed. I had started freelancing not long before, looking for a way to connect my professional background with my interests. I wrote about medicine, technology, and the overlap between the two. One of my early assignments was for a US-based blog that wanted a piece about possible applications of blockchain technology in healthcare. I said yes. Then I googled what blockchain was again. The assignment went well. More importantly, once the word blockchain appeared in my portfolio on a freelancer platform, new requests began to arrive. Clients seemed to be drawn to the keyword the way procrastinating students are drawn to cat videos. At first, I was slightly puzzled. The requests were no longer really about healthcare. Everyone simply wanted blockchain expertise. But the market had spoken, and I had decided to listen. I still wrote the occasional blog post, but the bigger assignments were something else: Increasingly, clients wanted whitepapers. What a whitepaper used to be At the beginning, I understood a whitepaper as a technical document: an explanation of a new blockchain system, or some other platform, for readers who needed to understand its architecture and purpose. That could be demanding, but it was also interesting. Each assignment became a crash course in what people believed blockchain could do. Then the focus began to shift. In calls, video meetings, and long email exchanges, it became increasingly clear that many clients were no longer imagining the whitepaper primarily as technical documentation. Yes, the technology still had to be explained. There had to be diagrams, architecture, token mechanics, roadmaps, terms like decentralization, governance, consensus, incentives. But the real task had moved elsewhere - the whitepaper was becoming a marketing document. Or perhaps more accurately: it was becoming a worldbuilding document. Its job was to take a system that barely existed and make it feel inevitable. A reader should come away with the sense that a new economy, a new infrastructure, a new coordination mechanism, a new kind of community was already taking shape - and that the only reasonable thing to do was to enter early. At some point, the potential of a new blockchain was no longer simply that it could create a new currency with which one person might pay another for a product or a service . It had become something else entirely. The internet needed money To understand why this mattered, we have to step back from blockchains for a moment and look at the internet itself. The internet began as a non-commercial undertaking. Its earliest predecessor was military; later, it was primarily a space for universities. When the first commercial internet providers arrived, the search for business models began. How could one make money in and with the internet? Who should pay for what? And not least: how? On the internet, you cannot simply slide a ten-euro bill across a counter. Digital money had to exist in some form. Electronic payment providers had existed for years. PayPal was founded in 1999, and online credit card payments had been possible for a long time. These systems worked, but they were centralized and remained part of the traditional banking system. And by 2008, that system had just catastrophically disqualified itself. Bitcoin was not born, like PayPal and similar services, from the cool calculation that online payments should become smoother. It was the anger and disappointment of the financial crisis, incarnated in the form of code. Not destructive anger, exactly - anger and the search for a better alternative. During the financial crisis, the dominant feeling for many people was helplessness. Losses caused by irresponsible men in suits were distributed across the shoulders of the general public, while profits still ended up in the pockets of a few. Bitcoin proposed an alternative that was supposed to give individual people a small piece of power back inside the financial system. The blockchain containing all transactions belonged to everyone and no one. Anyone could download a copy. Anyone, given enough computing power, could add blocks. Nobody had to act under their real name; only Bitcoin addresses were used. If things had remained there, Bitcoin might have become a historical footnote. Well-intentioned, perhaps even technically fascinating, but eventually forgotten. Like so many small protest technologies and movements. But Bitcoin was the premiere of a new technology on the stage of the internet, and that technology stirred the imagination of the people watching. Ethereum made the dream programmable One of those people was a teenager named Vitalik Buterin, who was introduced to Bitcoin by his father in 2011. He became fascinated by it, began writing for Bitcoin Weekly, and later co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. The longer he spent with Bitcoin, the more its limitations bothered him: Bitcoin can verify transactions and add them to a blockchain. That is already remarkable. But it is also quite specific. Blockchain technology could do more, and Buterin was one of the first to notice this. In 2013, he wrote his own whitepaper and proposed his own blockchain: Ethereum. Together with others, he helped bring it online in 2015. Ethereum's major difference from Bitcoin was that program code could run on the blockchain itself. These pieces of code became known as smart contracts. Applications built on them became decentralized apps, or dApps. Suddenly, entirely new forms of automation became imaginable. One could write a dApp, for example, that would reveal a secret piece of information - such as the access code to an apartment - only after the user had transferred a certain amount of cryptocurrency to a certain address. Whether or not this was the best way to rent apartments is another question. But for a while, the important thing was that it could be imagined. The rise of the token sale Startups began thinking about business models in which smart contracts could be used for useful, entertaining, or world-changing purposes. Very quickly, something else became clear: blockchain also offered new ways to raise startup capital. Purely digital, without begging banks or subjecting oneself to the personalities and whims of traditional investors. Without collateral, even. The idea was simple enough: a startup creates a new cryptocurrency, in the widest sense - a token or coin -, and sells it to many small investors. With that initial capital, it can build the business model it has promised. Maybe that business model exists in the real world, such as apartment rentals. More often, it remains digital. But digital businesses cost money, too: hosting, infrastructure, salaries, contractor fees, developers, designers, marketing people. Startup capital had to come from somewhere. But first, one large obstacle had to be overcome: many small investors, and hopefully a few larger ones, had to be convinced that the project, the planned business model, had substance and would absolutely, definitely work. And that is where people like me came in. By 2017, startups were knocking on my virtual door asking for whitepapers. In most cases, they no longer wanted neutral technical descriptions of platforms - they wanted documents that could draw a new world and invite readers into it. Whitepapers and novels Shortly before that, in 2016, I had published my first novel . In it, I had also invented a world: a space station, and the people populating it. At first, I did not notice any connection. Writing fiction and writing whitepapers seemed like completely different jobs. One belonged to literature, the other to technology - one to imagination, the other to the markets. But after the first few whitepaper assignments, I realized that I was not primarily using the part of my brain I had once used to write scientific papers. Rather, I was using the part that had recently invented a future world, a protagonist, and her adventures. The whitepaper had to explain enough technical detail to be plausible. But its deeper task was narrative. It had to answer questions no prototype could yet answer. What kind of world does this system make possible? Who lives there? What becomes easier? What old gatekeepers disappear? Why should anyone believe this future is not only desirable, but already approaching? Whitepapers and novels have something in common: in both, readers have to want to turn the page, again and again and again. In a novel, that desire pulls readers through the story. In an ICO whitepaper, it might pull them toward a purchase button. Before Web3 had products, it had stories Looking back, of course I was writing marketing documents, and they still contained a fair bit of tech explainership. But what fascinated me was something else. I was watching people use language to construct possible futures - naive futures, thoughtful futures, exploitative futures even. But hopeful futures too, technically interesting futures, surprising futures, even absurd futures. For a brief moment, many of them were real enough to change behavior. People joined teams in countries they had never visited. They worked across time zones for tokens that might one day be valuable. They wrote code, decks, blog posts, roadmaps, founder letters, Telegram announcements. They imagined new systems so intensely that the systems began to pull money, labor, attention, and hope into their orbit. Many of those projects disappeared. Some left behind only dead links, abandoned GitHub repositories, and tokens no one trades anymore. But the documents remain interesting: they recorded what people wanted technology to become. A way around broken institutions, and a chance for people on the margins to enter a future that had not made room for them elsewhere. An opportunity to make it in the real world, to buy a house, start a business, raise a family. That is what I remember most now. -- Author’s note: This essay is adapted from Dreaming Systems, my ongoing memoir and essay series on Code to Story about blockchain, technological optimism, and the imagined futures of the whitepaper era. \