AMA Recap: Panther's CEO, Oliver Gale, Discusses $ZKP Listing on BitMart and the Future of Privacy in DeFi

Panther Team

Jan 18, 2024 • 3 min read

BitMart:Panther partnership

In December 2023, Panther Protocol's $ZKP was listed on BitMart, a leading cryptocurrency exchange serving a global user base spanning 180 countries.

This partnership with BitMart and upcoming listings on other trusted exchanges are part of Panther commitment to make $ZKP more accessible to the wider Web3 community.

Panther's value proposition

Oliver Gale, Co-founder and CEO of Panther, presented his vision of how Panther Protocol solves some of the pressing pain points that act as barriers to entry to both retail- and institutional-level investors in DeFi.

Oliver asserts that, for the decentralized Web to scale and attract more users, it must first overcome several significant challenges that crypto faces. He summarized these as four key issues:

Exposed investment strategies: with the rise of blockchain analytics solutions such as Nansen, institutional investors are increasingly worried about exposed investment strategies.
Fragmented liquidity: the inability to leverage liquidity across multiple chains makes it difficult for institutions to buy and sell their preferred crypto without affecting the price.
Lack of transaction security: since June 2020, MEV bots have made at least $1 billion in profit across Ethereum, BSC, and Solana chains by exploiting transaction queues.
Compliance and privacy: existing privacy-focused DeFi products lack features to comply with AML/CTF requirements amid increased regulatory scrutiny.

Oliver explained how Panther's privacy-preserving infrastructure for the decentralized Web, consisting of a shielded pool, cross-chain bridges, and ZK compliance tooling, solves these issues. This means that users can send, swap, and receive shielded assets through Panther while their on-chain privacy is being protected.

Panther Protocol: the product suite

Oliver gave BitMart's audience a run down on how Zones within Multi-Asset Shielded Pools (MASPs) empower users by providing a unified privacy set for all assets within a given smart contract environment.

Panther allows users to trade stablecoins, utility tokens, and NFTs within a single shielded pool, simplifying trading in a privacy-preserving environment. The innovation of Zones represents the first coherent solution to enable institutional access to DeFi, as they enable AML compliance, customization, and enforcement.

Oliver expanded on how Panther Protocol’s rich feature set positions Panther as the go-to solution to onboard users to private DeFi in a privacy-preserving manner. Panther’s strong position is, in part, due to its integration with third-party on-chain compliance providers. This enables the protocol to authenticate users — solving for the KYC demands of regulators by offering users a unique set of credentials on completion of verification. This key innovation is that the user data is private thanks to zero-knowledge proofs generated directly within the user's browser. The credential provided allows the user to seamlessly integrate with blockchain-based DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers) and similar platforms.

Furthermore, due to the flexibility of its design, Panther users can access the protocol without being bound to a single compliance provider. Similarly, financial institutions can benefit from flexible zero-knowledge compliance tools or fully integrate their existing AML controls.

The current status of Panther

Oliver shared that Panther is currently deploying testnet versions of Panther Protocol in 9 Stages. Multiple protocol functionalities, such as intra-shielded pool transfers, DeFi swaps, and zTrade, are being tested during these stages. Through zTrade, users can conduct OTC transactions while enjoying unprecedented data privacy-preservation. More on Panther testnet stages here.

BitMark asks: What are you looking forward to?

Oliver, as always, enthused about the growing interest in privacy-preserving infrastructures. He feels that, thanks to the recent paper by prominent authors such as Vitalik examining Dark Pools, this is a clear signal that the market is ready for such solutions. As he points out, Panther is a pioneer in the space — having been building for over 2 years, and is looking forward to releasing the V1 of the protocol once testnet rollouts are complete.

Want to get involved?

If you are interested in joining our community of testers, there is still time. Panther is rewarding engaged community members with $ZKP in return for battle-testing the testnet version of the product. Learn how to get started as a community tester.

About Panther Protocol

Panther is a cross-protocol layer that uses zero-knowledge technology to build DeFi solutions that meet regulatory requirements and satisfy users' on-chain data privacy needs. The goal of Panther is to allow seamless access to DeFi and create a cross-chain-supported architecture that serves different use cases. Panther's zero-knowledge primitives are also generalizable to KYC, selective disclosures between trusted parties, private ID, voting, and data verification services.

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