Learn How Pather Protocol is Enhancing Privacy in DeFi With Co-Founder Oliver Gale
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
panther protocol, privacy, crypto, protocol, blockchains, transactions, building, users, token, wallet, multi asset, assets, web, chain, privately, shielded, listeners, swaps, pools, podcast
SPEAKERS
Oliver Gale, Crypto Travels Michael
00:00
In today’s episode, you will learn how Panther protocol is enhancing privacy in defi. I interviewed Oliver Gale, the co-founder of Panther protocol, and we dive into why privacy is important in Web3 and DeFi and much much more. Stay tuned and don’t miss this one.
00:18
Welcome to the New To Crypto Podcast designed to guide you through the crypto landscape with pinpoint accuracy created for the new and intermediate crypto investor. Join your host Crypto Travels Michael as he takes you through the different facets of getting started and succeeding in your crypto journey. New To Crypto Podcast brings you new episodes daily Monday through Friday with surprise bonus episodes sometimes on the weekend. Let me ask you, Are you new to crypto and don’t know where to start? Are you more experienced but have questions? Then you’re in the right place. This podcast is designed for you coming at you from the training center in the lifestyle design studio. Here’s your host CryptoTravels Michael.
01:11
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01:32
Welcome back to the show. Today’s episode is all about learning how Panther Protocol is enhancing privacy and defy and we have a special guest today we have the co-founder Oliver Protocol. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming out.
01:47
Hey, man, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.
01:50
Right? Awesome. Awesome. Ah, let me ask you. Can you tell our listeners just a little bit about yourself?
01:55
Sure. So I’m a Barbadian. I was born and raised in Barbados, actually born in England but raised in Barbados from three months old. I studied, accounting and management took interest in macroeconomics game theory International Finance at the University of Bristol, and was concurrently at University on Post University, running my own record label as a reggae artist singing, writing, performing my own songs and then publishing distribution and handling all of the business matters that pertain to that. Subsequently to that I was introduced to Bitcoin in early 2013. And within a week, set up the Caribbeans first exchange and expanded into cryptocurrency wallets and ATM networks, a broker dealer and second stable coin, which was the Barbadian digital dollar, which got us international attention and then a an investment from overstock.com into what became the company that built and deployed the first central bank digital currency in an economic union and currently has an 80% market share for retail CBDCs. And so from there, I went on to set up a private trading firm, because I had been invested in since the first ICO was master coin, and then Ethereum, and so on, so forth. And through that incubated a credit platform and an advisory firm. And then in 2020, I met my co founder in Panther, Anish Mohamed, and we saw complementary skill sets and experience and decided to form Panther protocol as as a project that we saw as being very much needed in our global societies, and digital economies, and also a problem, a big problem that we could really solve effectively. And so here we are. Awesome.
03:45
So he went from an award winning hip hop artist in the Caribbean to dealing in Central Bank digital currency. And I see that your co-founder was also one of the founders in the UK digital currency Association. And that’s exciting.
03:59
Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, I was, I was a reggae artist one year, and then hip hop artists of the year. So I switched genres and was successful in both. And my co-founder has worked on over 20 protocols, including Ethereum, and ripple ocean bows so we really make a strong team. I’m a serial entrepreneur. And so for me, this is a case of blending the experience and networks that we have had to build this protocol, which has a TGT coming up, while the TGT is on the 31st of January, put it that way. So at the time of recording, we’ve got just under a week. So it’s a really exciting time, all hands on deck. And, you know, we’re scaling and growing the business and the team and the community very fast.
04:46
All right, and that sounds great. Let me ask you in a nutshell, what is Panther protocol for our listeners that may not be familiar or your area with Panther may be new for the listeners?
04:59
Sure. So there’s two ways to look at the problem. One of the ways to look at it is that most blockchains are public blockchains, meaning all transactions are published on chain, which is an unprecedented level of visibility on people’s financial transaction history, which in many cases are small transactions and relate to personal acquisitions. It could be, you know, shopping at a supermarket or purchasing a prescription medication or whatever the case may be. But nonetheless, whether it’s big or small, all transactions are published on most major blockchains. And so this opens up a massive vector of surveillance in what is already a surveillance economy. And so large actors with the resources to analyze big datasets can learn a lot about what we as individuals and collectives and corporations do. And this goes against the grain of, of our rights to privacy rights to freedom and our sovereignty. So Panther addresses that by building a multi chain privacy protocol. And so, you know, it’s this mechanism of transacting on blockchains, more privately protecting alpha. So alpha is typically used as a term as it pertains to trading marketplaces. So for institutions or large traders that don’t want to publish what their portfolio looks like, or the transactions are executed, Panther enables that type of privacy. And so the protocol also extends in another direction. And that is what we call the K reveals which are zero knowledge proofs that some condition has been met or some action has taken place or not taken place. And a proof is provided of that to a Counterparty, which sounds like a very broad based tool. And it is so panther is building infrastructure to support all transactions in web three, that can be supported with a zero knowledge proof system being so supported. So that ranges from authentication of systems to compliance to ln health care insurance, you know, marketplace access, and so forth. So we really do have a broad based suite of solutions that tackle transactions and also prove a verifier data relay functions.
07:27
Okay, I really liked what your medium blog article says, I’m gonna paraphrase here, but it breaks it down as the objective of Panther protocol is to infuse the whole defi ecosystem with privacy. Aside from building unique technology that comprises the making innovations brought forward by Panther to succeed, we also need to make them accessible allowing e phi equal systems and crypto communities. I think that’s awesome.
07:52
Yeah, I mean, that is well said, and no credit to the team for coming with that copy. And when you break it down into the basic functionality that we’re providing to users in the crypto ecosystem, you can take an underlying token, let’s say it’s Ethereum, you can deposit it to your Panther wallet, and you are issued a z, which is a one to one backed token, that one to one back token can be sent as the Eat to any other Panther user privately. And so when the recipient receives their Zeth, from the sender, which transaction will happen at a lower cost, because panther is integrating scaling solutions, as well as privacy solutions, then that user can choose to redeem the ZT for ETH or it can interact with the fi using the z’s. So, this class of assets are called Z assets. And they are a new type of defy instrument, Blockchain instrument where ultimately Z assets are transferable across chains, as well as between parties on any particular chain. And that mechanism of transacting across the chain will be supported by our Inter chain private decks, which will be built and released approximately q3 of this year. And so that is a major piece of infrastructure for web three to connect transactions across different chains and provide a private venue for swaps.
09:26
Yeah, I’m excited to do a deeper dive with you and perhaps your co founder, and another episode, maybe a video for YouTube, where we break down this topic more in depth because I think it’s great when you guys are doing let me ask you. Why is privacy important in web three and defi? Like, you know, this concept may be new for some of our listeners. But why is privacy important with web three?
09:49
So I was touching on it a little bit earlier to and to say it again and in different words. Privacy is a fundamental human right and it is something where if you don’t have privacy then your negotiating position is undermined. And this pertains to any sort of transaction between yourself and a Counterparty who knows more about you than you know about them. It also undermines your sovereignty as an individual and gets counterparties leverage against you. And you can see that in the application of voter rights to democracy. And so privacy is a voter’s privacy, for example, is a fundamental building block for a fair election. And we see that it’s been proven that individuals who are surveyed behave differently to those who are not. So in that context, the very act of being surveyed, changes how you behave and undermines privacy and freedom. So we’re focused on this mission of ensuring that everyone has the sovereign right to privacy, and we’re building in compliance tools and systems that allow users to engage in things like regulated financial services or tax disclosures, credit scoring, etc, at their voluntary disclosure discretion. And so what that opens up is the possibility of having institutional DeFi where counterparties can work together and maintain and protect their privacy, whether its privacy for the sake of personal empowerment, or is privacy to protect your upside or alpha from competitors and ex unfair exploitation. So it’s a big mission, and we’re very proud to be one of the spearhead organizations talking in
11:47
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12:52
Yeah, that’s really good to see. Thanks for unpacking and breaking that down a little bit more. For the listeners. Things are great in that area, which you guys our listeners are familiar with. And currently using DEX’S or decentralized exchanges. However, what is your interchange on layer one private decks? And how is it beneficial? I know you mentioned in q3 it’s going to drop but can you give us a little sneak peek and some more info about it?
13:18
Yeah, so our tech team just came back from a workshop which we held in Dubai to map out the 2022 roadmap and delivery plan so Sprint’s are already underway in deploying the next version of Panther, which will be the full MVP. The next version is the staking protocol, which allows you to transfer and stake CKP which has a wonderful rewards program around it. The second phase is deployment of the multi asset shielded pools which are the pools in which you deposit assets and which allow you to interact with other users and smart contracts in defy privately so and then the inter chain DAX will be the release that comes out thereafter. So if I want to send transactions privately from the blockchain, a blockchain is there. You know, you have some options. There are bridges that operate like taxes, and they’re direct atomic swap bridges, we’ll be building both the interchange private decks, we’ve not yet determined, we’re doing some trade off analysis on whether it should be our own layer one or built on another layer one or layer two, and what that hub and spoke model should look like. But as you know, one of the major benefits of this venue is that it will allow the assets to be swapped privately. So the AMM will not have visibility, so it will be protected through a zero knowledge scheme. And then that’s an advantage. You can conduct the swaps with low slippage between the parties, which is a major advantage and the costs. Those swaps themselves are going to be low cost swaps using the technology we’re using. So if you are an institution or retail user, and you’re trying to privately conduct a transaction, cross chain Panther is the superhighway that will interconnect and bridge across those chains. So you can think of Panther like the superhighway interconnecting different blockchains privately when a user wants to send a transaction from one chain to another chain privately, and further when they want to send transactions within each of those blockchains, which we call pair chains in the Panther ecosystem privately, you can do so. So you can think of Panther like a hub and spoke protocol. The hub is the inter chain private decks, and the spokes are multi asset shielded pools. And so far, we have partnerships with six layer one and layer two protocols to deploy multi asset shielded pools or masks. And that partnership base is growing all the time. So that is part of the protocol. And we’re very excited about both the multi asset shielded pool deployments and the inter chain private networks, which we see as being one of the core pieces of infrastructure in Web3.
16:17
Awesome. Can you share with our listeners how that ties into the protocol?
16:23
Yeah, so ZKP is the governance and utility token, the token is used for voting on proposals through the Panther Dao. We will be implementing incentivized voting so that we’ll have an economic incentive for users to vote regardless of which direction they vote in. We’ve implemented that to some extent with a predecessor protocol called Launch Dao, which applied our ZKreveal schemes to enable our users to vote privately on launch in Panther protocol, which is the world’s first instance of a private on chain vote. And further that vote is used to enable launch style to deploy Panther. So in fact, content has a fully decentralized launch as well. The other utility purpose for ZKP is used to incentivize Relayers, it’s in use to incentivize privacy stakers, it is used to incentivize security of our interchange decks through some bonding mechanisms and to secure those bridges. And so there’s a broad utility for the token, there are mechanics in place to encourage staking long term lock up their mechanics in place that facilitate the DAO purchasing CKP for every transaction that happens through the Panther ecosystem. And those DKP are taken off of the market, which creates buy pressure organically. So there’s a lot of engineering that’s gone into the governance side of the protocol and also into the utility of the protocol itself. And CKP is at the heart of all of it.
17:59
Awesome. It looks like you have 1 billion for I’m looking at the key metrics on your one pager. Well, it looks like you have a billion in the total supply. And so what 5% of the supply is public sale?
18:10
Yeah, so we’ve sold roughly 20% of the supply. In total, we’ve raised 32 million US dollars to build out and deploy the protocol. We’ve got a world class team, which is rapidly growing as a result of that public sale, which was the final fundraising effort. And we raised 22 million US in 90 minutes with over half a billion dollars of demand for the token. So we did really well on that front. And from PGE, the market cap will be roughly 45 million US dollars to 60 million, which is very cheap relative to peers offering technology in the same bracket as Panther.
18:54
And it’s an ERC 20 token. Yeah. Okay. Changing gears here to another thing I wanted to ask you about, I was on your homepage, your website, which everyone will see, we head over to the blog posts page. In today’s episode, we have all your assets and links there and images, etc. But you have a multi asset smart contract protocols section on your site. And I know some of the listeners will see that and they might have some questions. Can you kind of give us a simplified version of what that section and what that component is all?
19:24
Yeah, sure, back. So when you use a zero knowledge proof to prove that something took place, a transaction took place without revealing who you are, you can use an analogy of something like a room with people in the room. If I give you zero knowledge, proof that I’m in a room, but I’m the only person in the room, and there’s no privacy at all, because you can use deduction to know that it’s me in the room. So in order for this zero knowledge proof to have effect, you must have other people in the room and the room in the case of Panther protocol Call is the shielded pool, and the people are assets tokens in those pools. So the more tokens in the pool, the more privacy is given. Statistically speaking, what Panthers do uniquely is enable a multi asset shield pool, where typically for protocols that offer privacy in this way, you will find that you must have one asset type per pool and create pools for each asset. And then build privacy for each of those. With Panther, you can put multiple different asset types into the pool. And so in that way, even small cap tokens can benefit from the privacy offered by the multi asset shielded pool. So in a summary format, the long tail of crypto assets can benefit from the privacy of other larger cap assets in the multi asset shielded pool.
20:50
It’s great, you guys have so many different areas and components are things that are on the tech side that you’ve been building into your overall protocols. It’s really exciting to see what you guys have gone through and all the time and effort that your team is taking in working with you.
21:07
Yeah, we’ve certainly been working hard now for over a year and a half, building this. Oh,
21:13
awesome. Let me ask you, how is Panther protocol helping institutions? I know we touched on that previously a little bit, but like, overall, how are you either helping institutions? Or how can you help institutions that may hear this and you know, or just find you guys organically and want to know more?
21:31
Well, institutions need to protect their users’ privacy, they need to protect their alpha. And so panther is the only protocol that facilitates the protection of alpha and privacy alongside compliance tooling through ZKreveals scheme. So it will be an opt-in service that institutions and their users will come into where they can say, we want to use multi asset shielded pools and the interchange decks. And we want to do so in a way where we can still make disclosures to our authorities and regulators if we need to. And in that manner, they’ll use CK reveals to selectively disclose information to a Counterparty as opposed to the status quo, which is all information is disclosed to everyone on immutable blockchains.
22:18
Let me ask you, is there anything else that you would like to share with the audience about Panther or anything else that you’re working on?
22:25
So I think panther is a project that any investor and anyone interested in their own freedom of sovereignty within Web three should be looking at. We have uniquely engineered a protocol to address some of the biggest problems in the crypto universe and the web three emergent web three universe. And I would say, you know, just keep an eye on us because we’re evolving and innovating and releasing tech on a regular basis now. And, you know, we’ll be listing on tier one exchanges at the time of from today in a matter of days, in fact, and so we will become a ZKP token and Panther protocol is going to become an increasingly known brand name and project in the space. So the sooner you’re aware of it, the bathroom.
23:19
Awesome, awesome.. Thank you for coming out here. Being part of today’s episode, and sharing all this. I really look forward to bringing you back on the show and doing a video next.
23:29
Awesome. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.
23:32
Absolutely. Welcome back anytime and for our listeners. If you like today’s episode, definitely subscribe to the podcast. We have amazing interviews as you just heard one here and chime in here tomorrow for another special episode. Until then make it a great day.
23:48
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