Panther, a privacy-preserving protocol for digital assets focused on DeFi, has released its comprehensive whitepaper on June 16, 2021.
Formed in 2020 by leading entrepreneurs and technologists, Oliver Gale (CEO) and Anish Mohammed (CTO), Panther Protocol positions itself as a decentralized privacy metaprotocol that enables confidential, trusted transactions and interoperability in DeFi.
In their whitepaper, the project distills their innovative thinking around on-chain privacy and proposes an end-to-end approach that leverages Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zkSNARK) and a game-theoretic model for pricing privacy.
At the core of their privacy solution are what they call zAssets, a new, fully collateralized, privacy enhancing asset class. Users deposit digital assets such as BTC, ETH and USDT into Panther Vaults, and can use their newly minted zAssets (zBTC, zETH, zUSDT) across DeFi.
The document covers notions of privacy, highlights the importance of on-chain privacy, and dissects the privacy vs. compliance dilemma, proposing that privacy and compliance can indeed co-exist. The paper also covers the economics of privacy and showcases the building blocks for enabling privacy preservation in DeFi, as well as implementation options.
Finally, the whitepaper describes the architecture of the protocol, with the actors of the network and its components, design goals and principles, and the project roadmap.
Some of the most interesting points are the description of the minting and burning of zAssets, their interesting take on privacy mining (which rewards network participants who bootstrap the protocol from an anonymity set perspective).
The thoughts behind their privacy-centric wallet, and the Panther DAO, which seeks to get community alignment through quadratic voting. The diagrams are well done, easy to understand and provide a clear picture of what’s being proposed.
Another innovative feature of Panther detailed in the whitepaper is how it handles disclosures.
Panther provides users with a customizable level of privacy at the transaction level, providing end-users with complete control over their privacy settings. While also allowing Panther to become future-proof from a compliance-friendliness standpoint.
The main goals of the protocol are explicit:
- to provide a secure, private transaction ecosystem with a superior user experience,
- to maintain composability with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols,
- to ensure privacy backed by a game-theoretic model,
- to establish verifiable trust relationships between participants,
- to develop a novel price discovery mechanism for privacy.
CEO Oliver Gale, who is also a CBDC pioneer, commented: “We believe that Panther can offer retail and institutional users the perfect middle ground between privacy and compliance. If we advance society to a level where compliance is verified through zero-knowledge proofs, Panther will have contributed to solving one of the largest challenges around privacy, while protecting users from the prospect of a dystopian surveillance economy. The ultimate goal of the protocol is to provide users with freedom and sovereignty.”
Panther recently announced successfully raising $8 million in private rounds for its interoperable privacy solution for DeFi. The funds were raised from more than 140 investors demonstrating the breadth and interest in the project, and a community-driven approach to fundraising.
CTO Dr. Anish Mohammed, who is also known for his over 20 years in security and cryptography, for being an early advisor to Ripple, an Ethereum orange paper reviewer, and for his work in several projects such as Ocean and Boson, complemented: “One of the transformative technologies to be developed over the past 30 years is zero-knowledge proofs, which allow you to prove that you are telling the truth without revealing the underlying data, or secret. It is exciting to be able to put this powerful technology to work in our project. This is a game-changer.”
To learn more, check out the whitepaper.
About Panther Protocol
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.
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