Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform

Edition

The whitepaper as published on ethereum.org, from the source of that page, public/content/whitepaper/index.md in github.com/ethereum/ethereum-org-website (commit 14ee8a9 of 28 June 2026, identical on the dev and master branches), checked word for word against the live page. Left out: the banner of the page (“Before you read”) and the three editorial notes of ethereum.org, one before the paper (“While several years old, we maintain the original paper below...”) and two after it (on the history of the whitepaper and the latest developments of Ethereum). The first heading of the page, the title of the paper, is in the header, prefixed with “Ethereum:” as in the PDF that the page offers (Ethereum_Whitepaper_-_Buterin_2014.pdf); the kicker gives the year that the page states (“This whitepaper was published in 2014”). Links show their text only; the note calls fn1 to fn3 and the link “How?” stay superscripts; the table of the issuance model and the nested list of the GHOST section are set in HTML; straight quotes are set as typographic quotes, except in code. The code blocks are as on the page, including the backslashes that the page shows in the code of the Fees section. The six figures are the PNG files of the page, unchanged, on a light plate in the dark themes. The MIT License of the repository follows the paper in small print.

Rights

Unless otherwise marked, (a) all material, data, and information on the Websites, such as data files, text, music, audio files or other sounds, photographs, videos, or other images, but excluding any software or computer code (collectively, the “Non-Code Content”) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; and (b) all software or computer code (collectively, the “Code Content”) are licensed under the MIT License.

Terms of use of ethereum.org, section Intellectual Property Rights, https://ethereum.org/terms-of-use/ (source: public/content/terms-of-use/index.md of the same repository); the Websites include ethereum.org, and neither the whitepaper page nor its figures are otherwise marked. This covers the text and the six figures, images of the page (https://github.com/ethereum/ethereum-org-website/tree/dev/public/content/whitepaper: ethereum-state-transition.png, ethereum-blocks.png, spv-bitcoin.png, ether-state-transition.png, ethereum-apply-block-diagram.png, ethereum-inflation.png; status: CC BY 4.0 under the same terms). The LICENSE file of the repository is the MIT License, “Copyright (c) 2019-2026 ethereum.org contributors”, for “this software and associated documentation files”; its text follows the paper on the poster, for the code.