Bitpanda launches Pantos: Could solve Interoperability Issue

Bitpanda unveiled Pantos, a DeFi multichain token system.
The company aims at solving interoperability en route to full decentralization.

Interoperability has been a major issue hindering the development of Blockchain since its creation. Interoperability facilitates transactions across multiple blockchains. Recent developments are promising; Bitpanda developed a multichain token system, Pantos, which will be launched today.

Users can use a new token standard, Pantos Digital Asset Standard (PANDAS), to send wrapped coins and create and deploy tokens across multiple chains with just a few clicks. This is an exciting development as it could boost crypto adoption and fuel the company’s growth.

Seven different chains — Ethereum, Fantom, Cleo, Cronos and BNB — will be supported by the Beta protocol. Plans to include and integrate other chains are in the pipeline. Markus Levonyak, blockchain engineer with Pantos, while speaking to the media, revealed that there would be no dedicated blockchain for Pantos, and it shall deploy similar smart contracts across multiple blockchains to facilitate interoperability.

Pantos Hub contract and Pantos forwarder are the two smart contracts deployed in PANDAS. Levonyak explaining about these two says:

“The Pantos Hub contract will manage all external communications, it’s also where our nodes register and tokens are managed. […] There’s also Pantos forwarder, which does signature verification for token contracts.”

When communicating in a cross-chain scenario, three categories exist – Consensus light clients, validator-based systems and Optimistic messaging systems. Pantos here will act as a validator-based system, and to initiate the transfer and communicate the information to other chains, the network will deploy Service and Validator Nodes.

The Public Beta would have Pantos introducing the Service Nodes to the networks, which means that everyone is allowed to set up and run their personal service nodes. Referring to the plans of going in for full decentralization, Levonyak said,

“The goal is to have a fully decentralized permissionless system in the end.”

Bitpanda did a research project back in 2018 in collaboration with the Technical University of Vienna to develop Pantos, an open-source research project aimed at establishing open standards for blockchain interoperability and fully decentralized cross-chain token transfers. In the following years, the team successfully released multiple working Proof-of-Concept solutions, portraying research results and intensifying the importance of blockchain agostic solutions.

Many interoperability solutions rely on a semi-decentralized mechanism. Still, Pantos wishes to facilitate token transfers across blockchains without needing any intermediary blockchain, securing the integrity of the blockchains involved. Even though Bitpanda is a centralized entity, its investment in Pantos highlights its commitment to a decentralized future.

The current scenario somehow forces one to stick to a certain blockchain. On this, the CEO and co-founder of Bitpanda and Pantos, Eric Demuth, argues that Pantos is not limited to DeFi. This project might be just the tip of the iceberg. Basic communication between different blockchains is a tedious task at best, and this is one of the reasons mainstream adoption of Blockchain might be so slow.

A person is tied to a blockchain, even if it may not be profitable anymore or has shown signs of a collapse or loss. Investors cannot easily shift and are bound to suffer losses. This newly launched multichain token standard could dramatically fuel DeFi’s needs.

Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while his post-graduation. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing along with being a developer. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing