Privacy coins and zero-knowledge technology, which is used by some to obfuscate the identity of senders/recipients and transaction amounts, have gained enormous popularity in recent years due to increased regulatory scrutiny against the cryptocurrency industry. cryptocurrencies. But despite its rapid rise in market capitalization, critics continue to scrutinize this asset class as facilitators to mask illicit activity.
In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Oliver Gale, CEO and co-founder of Panther Protocol (ZKP), explained the technology behind their decentralized financial privacy solutions, or DeFi, and why it is necessary for the cryptocurrency space. today:
CT: How much did they raise in their recent token sale, and what does their roadmap look like as of now?
OG: We’ve raised over $30 million in total. For the Panther protocol, we did several rounds of private sales, and then we did a public sale on November 23, which lasted 90 minutes, and we raised over $20 million during that time. The second question is about the roadmap itself, so the Panther Protocol is a multi-chain privacy protocol with several zero-knowledge and data disclosure tools built into it; what we are going to deliver in January is our minimum viable product (MVP).
We have several deployments this month. And that will be the delivery of an MVP that allows gambling on Polygon and the transferability of the ERC-20 token to the ZKP token. And then, I estimate 30 to 60 days later, we’re going to roll out the full MVP v1.0, which will have the multi-asset privacy pools and the multi-asset staking pools which are the ironclad tools where the assets from Panther can be used for private transactions. And that will also come with a version of ZK reveals, which is the mechanism by which users can voluntarily reveal their transaction data for compliance or tax reporting purposes, etc. That’s what to expect in the first trimester.
We have more than five EVM supported partnerships to deploy Panther v1 on Near, Flare, etc. These armored groups are being deployed in different chains. Also, our team is building an exchange powered by ZK across other chains, and the goal is to enable these assets to be traded securely, with low fees and high transaction throughput.
CT: What is the crypto underlying these assets?
OG: Multi-Asset Shielded Pools are based on ZK-SNARKS. So we have a combination. Shielded pools are, you know, a version of blend technology with the ability to split bond transfer assets. We then use ZK snarks for proof of ownership. So essentially, the transactions happen within the multi-asset, multi-asset sandboxes. And, and then the mechanism for data disclosure reveals is another ZK snark circuit, which is set up to essentially allow a trusted provider to provide proof that can be verified on the planter network of some data condition being met. . And that while it’s been applied to fulfillment is our first use case, and they put ZK reveals into production with released out, which is essentially a release is released out is what it sounds like.
CT: Skeptics would say that private networks using zero-knowledge cryptography could become facilitators of illicit transactions. What is your opinion about it?
OG: In my opinion, if you build a technology and have no intention of facilitating aid or enabling crime, you are not guilty of any crime. But why is privacy necessary? Our white paper says so; The bottom line is that actors who are under surveillance behave differently from those who are not. In other words, the exact behavior of our societies is affected by the fact that they are being watched. So, inevitably, there will be bad actors.
But I’ve never seen a gun on trial. Tools are not judged; people are judged. And the overwhelming consensus of our global society, for all the tools and technologies that we use, is that if the device is more beneficial to the majority than the minority that abuses it, then you use it. And if it wasn’t, I’m not sure we would have kitchen knives because knives are used for criminal activities by a minority. So any attempt to put privacy technology or blockchain technology on trial because a minority abused the system is an argument that can be applied to anything in life.