Monthly Update: June 2022
Another month of non-stop work for the Panther team has just gone by. We've successfully finished our first DeFi integration proof-of-concept, moved forward with Advanced Staking testing, and much more.
Table of Contents:
Dear Panthers,
Believe it or not, it’s July already, and we’re more than happy to share that we continue to meet milestones in our development. Our first proof-of-concept for a DeFi integration is complete, we’re moving forward with research that will empower the zero-knowledge community, and partnership opportunities keep arising everywhere.
Let’s jump right into our monthly update.
Tech and Product
Advanced Staking testing
We’ve constantly reiterated the importance of Advanced Staking as a predecessor to Panther’s v1. This is because the primitives used in Advanced Staking will be key to designing and building Panther’s Multi-Asset Shielded Pools.
Zafari, our incentivized testing program, continues to provide invaluable feedback for our upcoming Advanced Staking program.
In addition to last month’s findings, testers managed to catch a few urgent and high-priority bugs, as well as other lower-priority items throughout. While feedback has now slowed down as the system has already been thoroughly explored, we haven’t. Our team is hard at work fixing the last batch of bugs, and we will soon be able to swiftly roll out Advanced Staking on Polygon.
DeFi integration
While Advanced Staking progresses, we have successfully finished the first proof-of-concept of a DeFi integration. Through it, users can utilize Panther to access DeFi privately, interacting with protocols in a way very similar to what they’re used to.
The importance of a DeFi-compatible privacy solution cannot be overstated! Enabling the Multi-Asset Shielded Pools to augment DeFi as a whole with privacy lays the foundation for bringing trust to DeFi via Panther’s flexible disclosure capabilities.
More news on this, pronto.
Community and business development
Released our one-pager
As builders of a pioneering blockchain privacy protocol, we are tasked with introducing people not only to the need for privacy, but to its solution as well. Since this happens almost on a daily basis, we decided to create the most digestible (but still thorough!) explanation of Panther to this day.
We’ve redesigned the Panther One-Pager. It contains all the central points to grasp why PriFi is deeply necessary and how Panther is the perfect solution for enabling it, within a single standard sheet of paper!
New Panther Blog & Panther Academy
The Panther Blog went through a complete UX redesign. We’ve organized content by categories, removed cluttering elements from its interface, and added a dark mode, in addition to many other noticeable improvements. The Panther Blog is now easier to navigate and friendlier than ever! Our re-vamp also touched on technical aspects that make our blog easier to find through search engines and news feeds. All our precious existing content is still available with the same URLs for you to share.
Part of the reason to put in the effort and redesign our blog came from our plans to launch a valuable initiative from Panther for the crypto community: The Panther Academy. Our goal with the Academy is to improve accessibility to high-quality crypto education, even for subjects that could be considered basic by our audience of mainly hardcore privacy enthusiasts. Those interested in diving deeper into crypto, DeFi, and privacy can now come and learn about these subjects from us.
Our first Panther Academy article is already out and tackles private crypto transactions. Don’t forget to give it a read and share it with your privacy-curious friends!
Unofficial local language Twitter accounts
Panther Ambassadors have been doing a more than impressive job at spreading the Panther Gospel to non-English-speaking countries. We now have three unofficial Twitter accounts; in Español, Türkçe, and Français!
Here’s to all of our amazing ambassadors.
12k followers in CMC Gravity
In order to kickstart our CoinMarketCap Gravity following, we hosted a giveaway offering a $2500 $ZKP prize pool. Three weeks later, we can say with no doubt that it was a success.
Panther has attained the number one spot in engagement growth in CoinMarketCap’s blogging platform! That’s a pretty good reason to celebrate, don’t you think?
Panther’s CMC Gravity account now has over 12,000 followers, growing by almost a thousand daily. If you’re not among them, you know what to do: follow us now!
zTalks #2
The second episode of Panther zTalks touched on multiple intriguing subjects:
- The role of cryptography experts in Panther
- Why we foster the zero-knowledge field
- How significant is Advanced Staking in Panther’s roadmap
… and so much more.
Our Senior Architect, Adam Spiers, was a new addition to our team members’ panel for this episode. Show it some love, and remember to subscribe to our Youtube account!
Events
Oliver and Mike in Consensus 2022
Our Co-Founder and CEO Oliver Gale and Mike Chan, Head of Marketing, were present at Consensus 2022, the largest crypto and blockchain event worldwide. The conference hosting 500+ speakers from within and outside the cryptosphere took place in Austin, Texas, from June 9th to 12th.
Lots of partnerships talks, great panels about privacy, and walking around in Panther swag ensued.
Anish and Saif at NFT NYC
On NFT NYC’s 4th edition, Panther was well-represented by two heavy hitters of our tech team: Anish Mohammed, our Co-Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist, and Saif Akhtar, our Head of Product. The conference featured 1500 speakers and over 14k attendees.
Why are we attending NFT conferences, you might be asking? Well, because privacy for NFTs is definitely necessary, creating a fertile land for Panther to explore.
To learn why, check out this great thread by CEO Oliver Gale.
Features & Media
Anish AMA with Bittrex & interview on XT Cast
Bittrex was one of our first exchange partners to list $ZKP. They invited our CTO Anish for an AMA on Panther, where he elaborated on Panther’s goals, development, and our approach to decentralization, among other very relevant aspects. Make sure to check it out!
Anish was also invited as a guest in the brand-new XT Cast, specifically tackling how Panther is enabling privacy and trust through $ZKP.
Anish’s lecture at Cerberus Capital Management
Cerberus Capital Management, a leading global firm in alternative investing with around $60 billion in managed assets, invited our CTO on June 30th for a keystone lecture on “The Future of DeFi – Beyond the Crash”.
Oliver on Yahoo! Finance
As of late, crypto has become increasingly correlated with the stock market’s movements. These, in turn, are undeniably linked to interest rates set by the Federal Reserve. Yahoo! Finance’s article on the impact of the interest rate hikes on crypto counted on the expert opinion of none other than Oliver Gale, our Co-Founder and CEO. In his thought-provoking words:
“Cryptoassets are experiencing the fastest growth of any technology industry in history – almost twice the pace at which the internet was adopted in the 1990s. Despite a bump in the road here, this trend is still intact and will resume in the next year or two. For now, we have to bide our time until inflation is brought down.”
Worth a read!
Hirings
This month, we hired new Panthers for the following positions:
- Head of Compliance
- Content Writer & Social Media Manager
- Head of Community
Several roles remain open on our Angel.co page:
- Graphic Designer
- Applied Mathematician
- Blockchain Architect
- Cryptographic Engineer
- Cryptography Internship
- Cryptography Researcher (Zero-Knowledge Proofs)
- Full-Stack Developer
- Lead Front-end Developer
- Machine Learning Internship
- Senior Solidity Developer
- DeFi Research Analyst
- Product Marketing Intern
If you wish to work with us or know someone who might be a good fit, please apply right away!
About Panther
Panther is a decentralized protocol that enables interoperable privacy in DeFi using zero-knowledge proofs.
Users can mint fully-collateralized, composable tokens called zAssets, which can be used to execute private, trusted DeFi transactions across multiple blockchains.
Panther helps investors protect their personal financial data and trading strategies, and provides financial institutions with a clear path to compliantly participate in DeFi.
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