Now, days after the TOKEN2049 event in Singapore, we look back at an intriguing interview with Oliver Gale, co-founder of Panther, a protocol-building decentralized infrastructure for digital asset service providers.
The TOKEN2049 Singapore crypto event brought together leading voices in the crypto industry at the iconic Marina Bay Sands. The event attracted 20,000 attendees from over 7,000 companies and 150 countries. The crowd consisted of people looking to learn about the new trends in the blockchain space, suits comprising fund managers and investors, and the crypto degens- meme traders and NFT guys partying up the event.
Oliver Gale is a serial entrepreneur, CBDC pioneer, advisor, and global advocate of distributed ledger technology. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Elemental, a web 3.0 credit lending platform focused on democratizing affordable credit for underserved communities.
What problem have you identified in the space?
Gale identified the issue of traceability on public blockchains, where third parties can use blockchain data to identify transaction details. This means sensitive information from transactions like swaps, transfers, and even payroll payments and donations are publicly available.
“With 99.6% of value held in pseudonymous blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon, the scale of this problem is huge.”
The pseudonymous nature of blockchains leaves users susceptible to bad actors who may try to steal their strategies or front-run them.
Gale identified compliance as a challenge for institutional investors adopting private blockchain technology, identifying Tornado Cash as a case study.
Tornado Cash, a crypto-mixing service, was first sanctioned in August 2022 by the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). While the platform’s website went under, the application still exists on the Ethereum blockchain despite multiple block builders censoring its transactions.
How does Panther Protocol work?
When operational, Panther will be a fully decentralized protocol designed to preserve the confidentiality of its users’ on-chain transactions.
“Panther’s flagship feature is a Multi-Asset Shielded Pool (Shielded Pool). The Shielded Pool maintains user privacy through a shared anonymity set. Users of the pool can conduct transactions with one another, engage in peer-to-peer transfers, execute token swaps, and interact with external DeFi protocols.”
The Shielded Pool will be divided into logical partitions called Zones, enabling users to self-custody their assets with Panther. Zone managers can then use the platform to enhance their users’ privacy with on-chain finance.
“.. to the rest of the market, everything that happens in the Panther Zone will be private statistically, however, to the Zone Managers, everything that happens within that Zone is at their discretion.”
Zone managers can configure their Zones with various privacy settings to align with regulatory requirements. This includes options for both first-party and third-party KYC/KYB implementations. Each Zone is set up independently, allowing for customized configurations. In future updates, Zone managers will have the ability to create an unlimited number of Zones.
How is forking private blockchain to meet user needs different?
“One, it allows you to do it on a public network, and two, it allows you to access pre-existing liquidity.”
Are you limited to any networks right now?
“Panther is being designed so that it can be deployed on any EVM-compatible blockchain. The protocol is now on the seventh of nine testnet stages and will first deploy on the Polygon blockchain”.
Gale further clarified that Panther would deploy where there was demand, as maintenance costs would be high without traction.
Interview by Karnika E. Yashwant – Representative of Cryptopolitan at Token2049
Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/oliver-gale-panther-protocol-interview/