Panther AMA Recap

07 Sep 202018:08

AMA

Panther AMA Recap

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here:

Andrew Zapotochnyi, Head of Marketing,

Constantinos Antoniou, Head of Community,

Constantinos Antoniou

Hello! thank for having us!

Andrew Zapotochnyi

Hey everyone, thanks for bringing us here 🙂

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Welcome Andrew and Constantinos, thank you for taking your time today!
Our team has prepared several questions for you to start with
Can we start?

Andrew Zapotochnyi

Sure!

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

let's start with the introduction
Q1: Can you please introduce yourself?

Constantinos Antoniou

Sure, 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.

Andrew Zapotochnyi

I'm the head of marketing at Panther Protocol.
I've been in the blockchain space full time for the last five years and headed marketing at Ambisafe back in ICO times of 2017, headed marketing at Propy.com, bootstrapped a couple of my own marketing blockchain-specific ventures.
I also serve as an acting CEO at Blockgeeks.com and I came up with the ambitious Digital Independence Declaration idea (digindec.com) that brought me to Panther Protocol – I’m big on privacy and human rights.

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Thanks a lot! Now let's transfer to the project
Q2: Tell us a bit about Panther Protocol and what it does?

Constantinos Antoniou

Panther Protocol is an end-to-end privacy protocol for DeFi. Panther provides DeFi users with fully collateralized privacy-enhancing digital assets, leveraging crypto-economic incentives and zkSNARKs technology. Users are able to mint zero-knowledge zAssets by depositing digital assets from any blockchain into Panther vaults. zAssets will become an ever-expanding asset class for users who want their transactions and strategies the way they should always have been: private.
Panther is fully compatible with AML regulations globally through the use of the Panther Metastrate - a zero knowledge data layer that enables users to disclose all or some of their transaction history to parties of their choosing, either fully or through the use of zk attestations.
We are gearing up for a Public sale this quarter so if you are interested to participate please fill out the interest form https://share.hsforms.com/1NEKpcC84SFmK0fpd4sFoZQ8mifv
done

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Super!
Q3: Who are the folks who have something to lose with the lack of privacy in DeFi?

Andrew Zapotochnyi

Bitcoin and Blockchain technology enabled digital scarcity and the creation of permissionless, unstoppable, and immutable financial systems.

What we now call DeFi, has the potential to replace big parts of the traditional financial industry. The biggest smart contract platforms that facilitate DeFi ecosystems are inherently transparent, anyone can go to a blockchain explorer and find out your balances, transaction history, as well as the people or organisations you have transacted with in the past.

Blockchain analytics firms such as Chainanalysis and Ellipti, have developed sophisticated technology to make this kind of surveillance easier.
All of this leads up to the erosion of personal financial privacy as well as loss of apha for professional traders and institutions.

Institutions have expressed their reluctance to join DeFi in a big way until they can deploy complex trading strategies without the fear of them being quickly replicated, thus marginalising their effectiveness.

Additionally, big financial institutions need to protect their customers' sensitive information.

As you can imagine, privacy is a very important issue we need to address in order for DeFi to grow and gain mass adoption.
✅

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Wow! fulfilling answer
now about MVP
Q4: When are you going to launch your MVP? What features do you hope to deliver by then and what will be the typical use cases for early users?

Constantinos Antoniou

The Panther MVP is coming also this quarter along with the planned Public Sale. Our developers are working on it around the clock to deliver a great Minimum Viable Product that showcases basic use cases. The purpose of the MVP is to demonstrate Panther’s technology and let the users get a taste of what privacy on DeFi will look like.
We will launch our MVP on Polygon (formerly known as Matic) while the $ZKP token will be launched on Ethereum and use Polygon's interoperable capabilities to bridge it over. We chose Polygon because over the years it has demonstrated its incredible technical capabilities, it has very low fees which will allow the proper mixing of zAssets and of course there is a thriving DeFi ecosystem being developed there.
For example big DeFi protocols such as Aave have also launched on Polygon. Additionally, Polygon is EVM compatible, meaning that dApps are compatible with Ethereum and many other EVM compatible platforms making interoperability easier.
We are building the MVP to include:

-Panther web wallet
-Panther Vaults - custody the collateral of zAssets
-Minting and Burning of zAssets
-Liquidity mining
-Private transfer of zAssets
We are releasing a much more detailed Medium post about the MVP in 1-2 weeks and we think it will be one of the main pieces published so far, because it gives our community a high res look into the future.
done 😁

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Superb!
now let's take a glance on project's progress
Q5: We all have experienced a painful market crash that started with the bitcoin dump in may. For a lot of upcoming projects, that means changes in their fundraising strategy or public sale dates. Does Panther still plan on having a public sale in Q3?

Andrew Zapotochnyi

The market took a break for a few months now, and only very recently, it seems that it is picking up again. I'm sure many of you had a great weekend, and Monday is looking really good so far!

We have been carefully watching the market conditions and have been adjusting our token sale strategy accordingly. This is why we didn’t have a public sale earlier as intended.

We are still on track for Public Sale this quarter, but we haven't announced any details yet, so stay tuned and follow us on our social media for announcements!

We are also considering having another private sale round.

The best way not to miss our token sale announcement would be to fill out the interest form:
https://share.hsforms.com/1NEKpcC84SFmK0fpd4sFoZQ8mifv
We are generally positive on where it all goes in 2021 🙂

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Superb!
Now next question
Q6: One of the most fascinating things we learned about Panther but felt like not much information is available is about privacy mining - a specialized type of liquidity mining if you will - but with its own Panther twist. Can you share some of the details around how this will work?

Constantinos Antoniou

Privacy mining is a specialized form of liquidity mining which results in making it probabilistically hard to nail down the correlation between a given transaction on a blockchain and the identity of a person. Privacy mining is what enables Panther to facilitate a way to safely transact across all major DeFi platforms.
The process starts from the Panther pools where ‘privacy miners’ deposit. Just like liquidity pools, which serve as the backbone of decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, in a similar construct, Panther Pools are a collection of assets locked in a smart contract that enable users to privately deposit, withdraw, and transact zAssets.
As Panther Pools grow and the amount of transactions in the anonymity set increases, so too do the quality and cost efficiencies of decentralized transactional obfuscation that Panther Provides.
For making liquidity available for privacy mining, contributors to Panther Pools are rewarded in $ZKP, Panther network’s native token. The amount of fees they earn are in accordance with the size and length of their deposit.
forgot to say done ;p

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

thanks
one last question!
Q7: Privacy projects with a focus on bringing privacy to DeFi seem to be popping here and there. To name a few, there is Secret, Manta, Aztec, Blank, Sienna, Raze Network… we don't expect you to know everything about them, but could you talk about your key differences / advantages?

Andrew Zapotochnyi

Maybe the biggest differentiator that Panther has over its competitors is its unique approach to compliance.

Other ‘Privacy’ networks do not provide privacy. Instead, they provide private solutions.

Their users do not have the option to disclose information to 3rd parties like financial institutions, their accountant, or the tax department for compliance purposes.

Panther empowers DeFi users with full privacy, while also enabling them to provide different levels of disclosures for certain transactions.

Andrew Zapotochnyi

Selective disclosures are the future of compliance and the game changer institutional users have been waiting for as it puts them in control, providing unstoppable privacy and freedom to share data with whomever they decide.

So we are proposing 2 middleground solutions:

Constantinos Antoniou

1) 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).
2) 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 user is 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.
done

Cryptodiffer Community

Do you help in investigation on criminal activities with agencies since this platform is built to provide untraceable transactions?

How does Panther Protocol protect my financial privacy?
@Consanto

Andrew Zapotochnyi

We stand on the idea that the owner of the account is able to voluntarily disclose the information, such as a balance and transaction history. So we can't really make it ourselves as we don't even have any access to it.

Cryptodiffer Community

Are you planning to launch NFT for Native Protocol? Recently, many projects like Panther Protocol have launched NFT to attract investors, what is your opinion about the NFT industry?

Andrew Zapotochnyi

We're big in the NFT market, and we've just announced our partnership with StackOS, aiming to make NFTs private. You can see more info here: https://news.bitcoin.com/panther-protocol-and-stackos-partner-to-bring-privacy-to-defi-and-nfts/

Cryptodiffer Community

✅ Based on the idea that it will be possible to mint zAssets from stable coins I find it interesting to ask if it would make sense or be a good idea to save my money in zUSDT instead of $USDT for example Would you recommend this practice or would it be an additional risk I would be imposing on my savings?

Constantinos Antoniou

If you think about it, stablecoins are a fundamental part of DeFi, so many DeFi apps have been made possible because of them so naturally zUSDT or another stablecoin will probably be the first zAsset in the Panther ecosystem. You can convert your USDT for example into zUSDT and provide it as liquidity into a Panther pool. This way you will contribute to the anonymity set and make Panthers privacy stronger and at the same time getting rewarded in $ZKP.

Cryptodiffer Community

Aside from payment for fees within the Panther ecosystem and giving the holders a right to vote on governance issues, what are the other utilities of $ZKP ? How many units/amount of $ZKP must an individual hold to be able to participate in governance decision ?

Constantinos Antoniou

The Panther DAO will operate with a quadratic voting system. This means that voting will not be in favor of the whales. No matter how little $ZKP you hold your vote will count. You can read more about how quadratic voting works as Vitalik Buterin suggested here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

Cryptodiffer Community

🙋‍♀In your medium I noticed that your vision is to restore the right to privacy and protect your users from a surveillance economy. How do you plan to achieve this goal? In what period of time could you carry out this purpose?

Andrew Zapotochnyi

I'd say that the impact we're making is based on both enabling user privacy but then also making it regulatory friendly – making this voluntarily disclose of the information possible. We're hoping that this will eliminate the compliance risk and friction as well as make us more institution friendly, which will let us scale a lot faster than other privacy solutions.

Cryptodiffer Community

usually a project has a tagline that reflects the project, what is the tagline of Panther Protocol ? and why choose the tagline? does the tagline reflect what the Panther Protocol looks like?

Andrew Zapotochnyi

Our tagline, if you will, is "Restore financial privacy". We are a mission-based project, and we totally mean it. I'm personally very concerned with where we are with privacy in 2021 (not just finances-wise), and I came on board to Panther when I've made sure we're 100% aligned values-wise with the core team.
Anish and Oliver (co-founders) are meaning and mission-based people and if you read/watch more of what they talk about you'll see that it's real 🙂

Cryptodiffer Community

💣Do you have or plan to have a partnership or to attract investment from the HEDGE FUNDS & INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS ?

Constantinos Antoniou

We actually closed a successful private sale round raising $8 million from more than 140 investors, many of them funds and institutional investors. As mentioned earlier, we might have another private round soon so if you are interested please fill out this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1NEKpcC84SFmK0fpd4sFoZQ8mifv

if you want to find out more details about the previous private sale you check out this: https://blog.pantherprotocol.io/panther-protocol-raises-8-million-to-bring-privacy-into-defi-91f4eaf72afa

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

thank you fot the ama! it was a pleasure for us to host it!

Constantinos Antoniou

Thank you for inviting us to talk to you guys! CryptoDiffer is a community we respect and we're happy to share Panther's vision with all of you.

Lastly, please follow us on our social media

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZkPanther
Telegram: https://t.me/pantherprotocol
Medium: https://blog.pantherprotocol.io/
Discord: https://discord.gg/WZuRnMCZ4c

Andrew Zapotochnyi

Thank you everyone, it was a pleasure! Feel free to join our Telegram to get your questions answered!