Telegram AMA with Oliver Gale, CEO Recap: March 17th, 2022.
Table of Contents:
Always with decentralization and the participation of the Panther community in mind, we continue to open forums of discussion!
This time around, our Head of User Experience, Chris Folta, hosted Oliver Gale (CEO), Adam Spiers (Chief Architect), and Saif Akhtar (Head of Product) in a Telegram AMA with over 100 members of the community. The event included an update by Adam on the status of fixing the Polygon Staking bug, as well as answers by both Saif and Oliver to your questions.
What follows is a condensed summary of the most interesting questions, answers, and ideas discussed in this opportunity:
Question: Is there a regulatory reason why U.S investors are kept away by the Panther team from buying $ZKP? The public sale and listing on exchanges did not allow U.S citizens to participate. Also, the decision not to provide liquidity on DEXs excluded those investors.
Oliver: Panther does not seek to exclude any actors from any countries from owning or holding the ZKP token, nor from using the protocol. That said, the Panther team is responsible for abiding by the law. Our attorneys advised us against receiving funds from U.S. purchasers to avoid the risk of the SEC considering $ZKP a security. The decision not to receive funds from purchasers in certain regions was based solely on these grounds.
It just so happens that the centralized exchanges that we got listed on initially share the opinion of Panther Ventures’ legal team and attorneys and therefore also hedge their risk by not accepting U.S. users. Decentralized exchange liquidity is a separate matter, but there has been no conscious decision not to provide liquidity (in fact, we’re about to finalize outlining our process to do so), and the current lack of liquidity provisions is not geared towards excluding anyone.
Question: You had mentioned in previous AMAs that the team is contemplating/doing due diligence on providing liquidity on a DEX. Since the MVP will be on Polygon, and currently, none of the exchanges $ZKP is listed on support Polygon, do you think it is crucial to provide liquidity on a Polygon DEX soon so people can easily buy $ZKP and access the MVP? How far are we in the process of deciding on providing liquidity on a DEX?
Oliver: The decision to provide more or less liquidity reflects more on the extreme market circumstances that we’re living through now than on a decision to exclude citizens of any country or any kind of user. We would want nothing more than to be providing enough liquidity for everyone to conduct any size of purchases or sales of the $ZKP token right now. That said, we have to see to the interests of the protocol and of its Treasury. Providing liquidity entails many different things, such as the possibility of incurring monetary losses, and it’s in our best interest to be careful every step of the way. This doesn’t mean that we’re not looking into solutions to provide more liquidity and allow these users to participate in the protocol by owning the token easily.
Polygon is an integral part of our MVP design, as you said, and it plays a significant role in what we aim the protocol to be. In this regard, it’s also important to note that users can always create their own liquidity pools, which is totally permissionless in most DEXs. With the project being decentralized, as it is, we highly encourage users to participate by becoming liquidity providers and help decentralize these practices even further.
We are currently looking at several options around providing liquidity and conducting our due diligence. One of them includes listing on more centralized exchanges with more connectivity, but another also involves ICHIDAO. We’re currently in conversations with ICHI to become a liquidity provider and start using their services. We should be presenting developments on this front over the next couple of weeks.
Question: What is the future of the protocol? What are the plans? Why do so few people know about it?
Oliver: The protocol’s future is complete and total world dominance, at least when it comes to privacy. Now, that might sound like a joke, and it is, but we wouldn’t be trying something as ambitious as Panther if we didn’t have the highest expectations and the highest targets.
The question is kind of all over the place, but you have to realize our protocol is at a very early stage, it has reached some milestones very successfully already and has quite a long way to go. We are to continue proving ourselves through the steps of our development, and recognition will come naturally with that. We wanted to launch in a decentralized manner. We did it. We implemented staking through the DAO and migrated to Polygon reasonably quickly. The next frontier is the launch of our MVP with Multi-Asset Shielded Pools in Polygon. As we continue to upscale our marketing and community efforts and reach our goals, the recognition level of Panther should grow.
Question: Hey Team Panther, when can we expect details on the stablecoin idea that Oliver mentioned in the previous AMA?
Oliver: The stablecoin idea is basically the fact that Panther can become a token-agnostic alternative that enables truly decentralized cash. We’re not betting on any single way of creating a stablecoin. Rather, we’re allowing for a system in which all kinds of stablecoins can be really interchanged privately.
A lot of alternatives, including Bitcoin itself, have promised to be digital cash, but, as you know, this really hasn’t transpired. And, in the current blockchain panorama, the possibility of it happening, even with CBDCs, results in total surveillance and lack of privacy for users, which you know goes against the Panther ethos. We think that, with a protocol like Panther, users could use all kinds of stablecoins, even CBDCs, if they choose to do so, to transact privately. By allowing users to comply with regulations by disclosing their data voluntarily, Panther further expands on the idea of how digital cash should be: Compliant, but private by default. In this case, we would be doing humanity an excellent service.
Question: What are our thoughts on the new Espresso blockchain / CAPE (Configurable Asset Privacy for Ethereum) as a competitor?
Oliver: I understand the intention around the question, but it’s essential to realize that not everything related to privacy is a direct competitor to Panther. Now, this could be the case, but Panther is not trying to do the same thing that most projects in the privacy space are trying to do. We are trying to create a new way in which the existing crypto ecosystem can be infused with privacy, as opposed to how other projects are trying to reinvent the crypto ecosystem completely to allow it to have privacy. We think about this in terms of network effects and aim to improve existing, highly successful infrastructure.
The project you mention is an interesting player that has recently been brought to our attention, but we do not see them as direct competition. In fact, it’s in Panther’s interest to increase our Research department, for which we always count on building allies in the privacy community.
Question: Have you seen Flare’s Layercake and State Connector, and if you have, any thoughts on them, and when we realistically might see some integration with Songbird?
Saif Akhtar, Head of Product: We know how State Connectors work in Flare and we will explore them as options in the integration. We will start to work on Songbird by the end of Q2.
Please stay tuned to our social channels for upcoming AMAs! We intend to continue hosting these sessions as a way to remain in touch with those supporting our mission to infuse DeFi and crypto with privacy.
We’ll see you on the next one!
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.
Stay connected: Telegram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Website