Advice needed: is it possible to mint a whitepaper / research article as an NFT such that only
holders can open and read it?

Building something new. Host: /venturecapital /adventures /theitinerant

Building Nansen for Web3 builders @dmnddao 

Geek out on network analysis and the political economy of knowledge.

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Well, I guess it's slightly more complicated than that. You could store the document on something like IPFS and then have the NFT "unlock" access. 

Lit Protocol facilitates this, for instance