Since the arrival of Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal Bitcoin white paper in 2008, white papers have become a staple of the blockchain industry. These papers provide information on blockchain projects and sometimes try to lure investors.





LongHash’s previous analysis demonstrated how white papers have grown longer through the years. Now, we have identified the most popular topics among white papers.





To get a big-picture view of the industry, we analyzed the language of 2,431 white papers with an eye on thematic trends. Below, you can see a chart that demonstrates the distribution of topics, and how frequently each topic was discussed. White paper themes covered everything from games to art to logistics to charity to food.









The fact that mining was the most commonly mentioned topic isn’t a huge surprise, given that many cryptocurrencies have token mining or minting systems that would need to be detailed in a white paper. Discussion of markets was nearly as common. Many tokens aim to create some sort of token economy and dedicate a significant amount of white paper space to explaining how it will work.





Beyond that, though, there were some interesting trends. Gaming is a popular topic, which makes sense given the popularity of projects like CryptoKitties and Fomo3D, which inspired a variety of similar projects. “Loan” suggests that there’s a strong trend of fintech blockchain projects, and topics like ads, trade and art are also quite popular.





Some of these keywords reflect the ideals of blockchain, which aims to be a tamper-proof ledger that is visible for the world to see. Blockchain is supposed to help improve transparency and fight corruption, which may explain the appearance of words like “health” and “charity.” Blockchain is also supposed to improve trackability, which may explain words like “logistic,” “auction,” “trade” and “copyright.” The topic distribution is just an estimation based on a certain statistical model, for reference only.





It’s also important to note that our chart is not based on a simple keyword count. In each category, we counted a variety of related terms to get a more accurate idea of how much a topic was actually being discussed. The chart includes the term “mine,” for example, but we didn’t just count the number of times the word “mine” appeared in white papers. Instead, we looked at a variety of mining-relevant vocabulary, including words like miner, pool, electricity, energy, GPU, water and hardware.







