Panther Protocol Summary Recap with Shin Chan Community
We held a live AMA with Co-Founder & CEO, Oliver Gale and Head of Community, Constantinos Antoniou on 10th June 10:00 PM (UTC+8). Here’s the recap for those who missed it.
Introduction
Jack | ShinChan: Before AMA start, can you introduce yourselves and the team background?
Constantinos Antoniou: My name is Constantinos Antoniou, and I am handling all of the community aspects of Panther. I’ve been involved and Co-founded local communities in my country Cyprus. Organized a few conferences and I’ve been advising projects in terms of marketing and community. I was also the Head of Research at D-CORE, a crowdsourcing platform where we research and analyze Blockchain projects.
Oliver Gale: I’m Oliver Gale, CEO and Co-Founder of Panther Protocol — as such, I’m heavily involved in Strategy and Business Development for the project, but also working closely with the tech and product teams to turn our vision of Privacy in DeFi into reality.
I’ve been in crypto since 2013 and since then, I’ve been a director and advisor for numerous successful blockchain and fintech ventures, building mobile wallets, cryptocurrency exchanges, digital securities marketplaces, quantitative trading systems, credit platforms and AML compliance tools. I am also a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) pioneer, having launched the first CBDC in the Caribbean
Over the last 9 years, I have championed policy making discussions and thought leadership in many institutions including the United Nations, IMF and numerous central banks and governments.
Jack | ShinChan: Do you have any news/update about Panther Protocol would like to share with us?
Oliver Gale: the newest update is our partnership with Flare Network to build a Panther deployment on their layer 1 protocol. On the technology side we just finished a high level spec for private NFTs
We also released the detailed version of our roadmap. You can check it out here: https://panther-protocol.medium.com/heres-the-panther-roadmap-our-quest-for-private-defi-88db93dacd4f
AMA Twitter Section Begin:
Q1: I saw that Panther Protocol introduces a new concept of interoperable, private asset class called zAssets. Could you give us more details about it? What makes this assets different from the ones we already know? What are the advantages this zAssets bring to users?
Constantinos Antoniou: zAssets are privately minted cryptoassets that are derivatives of other typically non-private cryptoassets (e.g. Ethereum ERC-20 tokens and similar). A zAsset is pegged 1:1 to the underlying cryptoasset which is locked as collateral in Panther Vaults; the latter may be partially or fully redeemed by burning some or all of the minted zAsset. They can be used within Panther Protocol to transact in confidential ways and provide liquidity to Panther Pools.
We believe that privacy infused zero knowledge assets (zAssets) will become an ever expanding asset class, in an ever expanding DeFi ecosystem. We believe that capturing that opportunity is a trillion dollar opportunity, with a T.
Q2 : How will the selective privacy disclosure mechanism benefit Panther?
Oliver Gale: Selective disclosures are the future of compliance and information sharing across web 3.0. It’s a game-changer institutions and their users have been waiting for as it puts them in control, providing unstoppable privacy and freedom to share data with whomever they decide.
Between fully public and fully private, there will be different levels of disclosures available:
Zero-knowledge disclosures: Users can prove compliance without providing any underlying data — meaning they provide the financial institutions what they need (to know you did everything in accordance to a certain rules engine), without having to disclose anything about the transaction itself (sender, receiver, amounts, metadata — all of that remains private).
Full disclosure to a specific counterparty: Here the user allows the transactional data to be shared with the financial institution or the regulator, but that’s already much better than having all of your transactions fully public/transparent for anyone to see, in perpetuity.
The key things to take into consideration here is that a) the users are in control to interact with whoever they want and disclose whatever they want, and b) any selective disclosure method is already much better than fully public transactions.
Q3: I have read that Oliver Gale has been an advocate for financial issues for governments including the UN, IMF since 2013, while Anish Mohammed has a background in the UK Digital Currency Association. How will the experiences you gain in the sector reflect on the Panther protocol?
Oliver Gale: For me, it’s almost a decade of advising governments on AML policy as it relates to blockchain technology, designing national payment systems, drafting legislation, and generally speaking at workshops and in working groups at universities like MIT and Columbia has allowed me to understand exactly what is important to building and maintaining a free, effective and safe economy from the perspective of technology and the regulator. Panther is built to manage that balance of interests. There are also direct connections to these governments central banks and so forth that our team is exploring for protecting privacy not just at the individual and enterprise level, but also at the national level.
Anish has similar experience with a deeper focus on technology. The outcome is a balanced product design with strong core technologies
Q4: We recognize that DeFi and Web3 are problematic in terms of individual freedoms and protection from economic espionage. As Panther, can you share your sensitivity and general point of view on this issue with us?
Oliver Gale: If DeFi is to replace traditional finance, we’re looking at it becoming 3 orders of magnitude larger than it currently is. Now, how important is privacy to all of the users? If you knew that all your transactions are being logged immutably and that competitors, oppressive regimes, Big Tech companies and anyone for that matter could spy on your transaction history, and extract a lot of information about you, would you want to protect it? This is not about having something to hide, it’s about having self-sovereignty and ownership of your own property — data.
It is important to remember that privacy doesn’t necessarily mean secrecy. The concept of privacy is the ability to choose the people or organisations to which we are happy to entrust certain matters. And that is why privacy on public blockchain networks has always been such a difficult topic.
Individuals may wish not to disclose certain payments — for example, where it implies a link to a particular person or organisation where discretion may be preferred, or simply because they do not want their friends and neighbors to know how much money they have.
Institutions acting on behalf of customers may need to obfuscate transactions from the general public to provide their clients with the degree of privacy to which they are accustomed. And institutional trading desks may have thousands of entirely valid reasons for not wanting to open up their activities to the scrutiny of competitors — the risk of being front-run, for example.
Q5 : Can you name a strategic partnership of a well-known blockchain project with the #PANTHER protocol?
Constantinos Antoniou: Last week we announced our partnership with Flare Network. Flare is a scalable, highly decentralized smart contract platform that runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine and utilizes Federated Byzantine Agreement-based consensus.
Panther will build its solution on Flare to bring privacy and confidentiality to the network. This partnership is very important for Panther as we increase our interoperability but most importantly it provides access to approximately 65% of the total value in public networks that are currently not accessible to smart contract platforms.That includes Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple’s XRP Ledger, Dogecoin, Stellar and any other existing chain.
We are excited for this partnership and the possibilities that brings with it!
Forgot to mention that Flare is not the only partnership we are working with. We have nice pipeline of partnership coming up soon including Sentinel and Liquality.
Telegram Live AMA Begin:
Q6 :What are #Panther’s plans for future partnerships? Are you open to partnerships with other networks/blockchains? What are you most looking for in a partnership to strengthen the #Panther?
Oliver Gale: Panther is a metaprotocol that can be deployed on any smart contract platform and privacy is a service useful for every DeFi protocol. Similarly, for CeFi players. We are open to partnerships with everyone, however, we are prioritizing the bigger layer 1 protocols at this time to build towards interoperability
Q7 : I’m curious if you’ve conducted any security audits? What steps have been made to protect the investors from hacks, exploits, and other similar threats?
Constantinos Antoniou: Not yet but Panther development is guided by in-house security expertise. Our engineers have over 40 years of cumulative expertise in security, and have worked on securing some of the most famous protocols like Ripple, for example. The smart contract stack will be fully audited by industry-recognized security researchers prior to launch.
Q8 : 🌡️When users deposit digital assets in Panther Vaults, how will they convert zVaults into zero-knowledge zVaults? What is the advantage of converting and how are ZVaults minted?
🌹 Why is privacy necessary for Defi and Web3? What will you do to make Panther’s zAssets an ever-expanding asset class and how will you bring privacy to NFTs?
Oliver Gale: zAssets are deposited in Layer 2 vaults (eventually Layer 1) and then converted into the fully backed zAsset equivalent. Once a zAsset is minted it can be sent to any other Panther user privately. It can also be sent to a standard ERC20 address privately, and in later protocol versions will be able to interact with DeFi seamlessly and privately on one chain or in cross-chain applications.
Q9 : I totally agree with PANTHER that my TRANSACTION is mine, today’s blockchain world really needs a project like PANTHER not everything has to be transparent and always visible, So how do I join and support this project?
Constantinos Antoniou: We need people like you! That recognize the value of privacy. Please join us in the conversation and follow us our social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/panther_prtcl
Telegram: https://t.me/pantherprotocol
Discord: https://discord.gg/WZuRnMCZ4c
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PantherProtocol
Medium: https://panther-protocol.medium.com/
Q10 : Who is the Panther’s closest competitor?
Are you/are you planning to be an L1 blockchain, or a privacy solution on top of other ETH/L1?
I see that you plan to have 3 phases are phases 2 and 3 based on the original blockchain?
Oliver Gale : This industry has so much room to grow we don’t consider other protocols offering privacy as adversaries — we are all connected by a common mission to enhance individual freedoms. We’ve extensively covered other protocols on Ethereum and other blockchains, whilst there are common features we don’t see any of them taking the approach Panther is taking to actively service both unstoppable user privacy and institutional compatibility. From a technical perspective our team is everyday pushing the boundaries of the possible so I see that as another differentiator that will emerge over time, remember this protocol is still young!
We are considering our own layer 1 private cross-chain DEX which will serve as the computational layer for privacy pools. At the moment, we will be deploying a layer 2/Layer 1 solution on Ethereum.
Q11: How do you ensure that there are enough transactions taking place at the same time to maintain the privacy of users using Panther?
It is known that the larger the number of transactions, the more privacy… How do you make sure the protocol is bootstrapped in that case?
Constantinos Antoniou: The more transactions and liquidity in the Panther pools, the better for privacy. There is a minimum threshold for both -number of transactions and liquidity — that guarantees that a transaction will remain private. Only if the minimum threshold is met the protocol will allow for transactions to go through, it will not let anyone use it if privacy is not guaranteed.
That said, the way we get the pools to have the liquidity we want them to have, is by rewarding privacy miners for providing liquidity. We are in touch with various institutional liquidity providers to ensure that our privacy pools will be robust from day one, bootstrapping privacy into our protocol and making the technology usable.
Game theory mechanics supports these thresholds by dynamically adjusting the transaction fees to incentivise liquidity and transaction count. It’s worth noting that our game theory advisor, Akaki Mamageishvili is one of the most notable experts in the field, and that our tech team has decades of cybersecurity and cryptography experience so we are confident that we have the right people on deck to deliver on this.
Q12 : It is says that crypto use for money laundering and criminal activities. As your aim to keep transaction totally untraceable then How would you assist in investigation on hacking or criminal activities with agencies?
Oliver Gale : We are a team of talented individuals building a decentralized protocol to restore privacy and enable compliance between any parties on a global basis and in a decentralized fashion.
We do not control private keys.
We do not facilitate or process transactions.
We do not keep user data.
We do not spy on user data.
We do not operate the protocol.
You, the user, do that. It is your responsibility to obey the law, report your transaction data when requested, comply and be a good citizen. Panther is a tool of the people, not an agenda for any group.
Q13 : Why did the Panther Protocol choose the Ethereum network?
Do your team think the ETH 2.0 update will solve the high gas price that make networking difficult to use these days?
Oliver Gale :Biggest DeFi market cap. Largest devleoper base. Very strong technology in ETH 2.0. Many other chains build EVM compatibility making cross chain use cases easy
Q14: Your project’s roadmap and milestones? What do investors and partners contribute to the development of the project?
Constantinos Antoniou: We just released our detailed roadmap actually.
Almost all of our investors are also supporting us various strategic matters. Could be marketing, introductions, liquidity or technology. We have managed to gather a very strong set of friends in the industry ☺️
Q15: 🧨 It caught my attention the fact that Panther Protocol claims to be a private platform, but still KYC and AML are needed. Can you tell us more about i? Why is this information needed? Isn’t the gathering of this data a bit contradictory to what the platform claims to be?
🧨 I saw that Panther Protocol uses both zeroknowlege proof and game theory as mecahnisms to provide privacy. Can you tell us more about this? How can this to mechanisms help you more than others? What are the advantages of using both of them?
Oliver Gale : KYC is needed to invest into the token sale run by the Gibraltar based and regulated Panther foundation. That is completely separate from the Panther DAO which is all onchain and decentralized. The information is needed because our team has to comply with the Gibraltar regulation around token sales.
zk Proofs are used to generate private proofs of ownership of zAssets and enable transactions in Panther pools.
The game theoretic model incentivizes a minimum privacy threshold set by the ZKP token holders. Our whitepaper will be released shortly and will have a full description of the game theoretic model and its method of bootstrapping and pricing privacy.
Q16 : 🔵 Your Medium article states that the key features of the Panther protocol are not limited to layer 1 or entity type. What exactly does this mean?
How to extend Panthers privacy features?
🔵 Can every zAsset minted by collateral be minted for other cryptocurrencies besides zUSDC, zETH or zBTC? For example, zCOMP, zDAI, etc. What is taken into account in collateralizing zAssets?
Oliver Gale: 1. Anyone can use Panther (user, institution, even DAO)
2. Panther has partnerships and can extend privacy pools to any layer 1 protocol. This is how privacy is extended to other communities.
3. Any zAsset can be minted on Ethereum. The only consideration is ensuring collateral is maintained in the same asset at a 1:1 ratio
Q17 : ️Is your project GLOBAL or LOCAL? What are your plans to expand it to all over the World? Can we joint your great project from anywhere in the world???
Constantinos Antoniou: We have a distributed team, 25 people strong, from all over the world. Probably from all continents. o if you are interested you can work with us from anywhere in the world.
Panther Protocol is looking to hire world-class talent for the 3 following positions:
1 Cryptography engineer
1 Front-end developer
1 Full-stack developer
If you know anyone that might be interested please let them know.
Apply here: hr@pantherprotocol.io
Q18 : Many promising projects have commented that transparency is really a problem, and that privacy is necessary, but this statement has not yet been adopted by DeFi users, but do you really think that in the end DeFi will end up being completely private?
Oliver Gale: No I think there will always be users that don’t care about privacy enough to take the extra step to use it. I also think that every DeFi privacy solution in existence today is prohibitively difficult to use — you really have to want privacy to use these protocols. Our team believes privacy should be a seamless extension of the current user experience, this is why we are working on so many partnerships
Q19 : My question is very easy and please answer properly..
What is the correlation of the Panther Protocol with the price of $ZKP..??
Oliver Gale: Voting on fees, Panther Improvement Proposals (PIPs), bounties, privacy thresholds etc. will require ZKP and users will be rewarded for participation as the incentive is to get involved in governance reducing circulating supply.
ZKP is used to reward privacy miners who provide onchain privacy to the Panther pools.
Transactions are paid in the native asset being transacted and sent to the DAO which which then buys ZKP and stores in treasury. This also drives value.
As a result there will always be inflows and outflows of ZKP from the protocol, with enough transaction activity Panther becomes deflationary, improving privacy incentives and therefore efficiency in a virtuous cycle. Cheaper privacy, more transactions, greater deflation, higher token price, more valuable rewards, cheaper privacy etc.
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