q-fin.CPJan 28, 2026

Are Whitepaper Claims Reflected in Market Structure? A Contamination-Aware Pipeline and a Power-Limited Null

Authors: Murad Farzulla

Organizations: Dissensus, London, UK · King’s College London, London, UK

Abstract

Do the functional narratives in cryptocurrency whitepapers correspond to how their tokens behave in markets? We develop a content-verified, contamination-aware pipeline for measuring structural correspondence between project narratives and market structure, and report two results. The first is a cautionary one. An apparent entity-level signal in an earlier version of our corpus -- specialised tokens appearing to align more strongly than broad infrastructure tokens -- was entirely an artifact of corpus contamination: roughly a quarter of the documents were failed-download stubs or wrong-document whitepapers (for example, a "Cosmos" entry that was in fact Binance Smart Chain text), and the apparent ordering does not survive content verification: on the clean corpus no token registers as helping alignment. We therefore report it as a contamination diagnosis, not a finding. The second is an honest null. Combining zero-shot NLP classification of 43 content-verified whitepapers across 10 semantic categories with seven cross-sectional market-structure statistics computed from hourly data (17,543 timestamps, 2023-2024), and aligning the two spaces with Procrustes rotation and Tucker's congruence coefficient (φφ), we do not detect a significant claims-market alignment in this n=43n = 43 sample (dimension-matched φ=0.303φ= 0.303, zero-padded φ=0.223φ= 0.223; both non-significant). A positive-control and power analysis shows the binding constraint is the low reliability of the text instrument: the minimum detectable effect is φ0.66φ\approx 0.66, well above the observed 0.22\approx 0.22. This is absence of evidence for alignment, not evidence of its absence -- we can reject strong alignment (φ0.70φ\geq 0.70) but cannot distinguish weak alignment (φ0.3φ\approx 0.3) from none.

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