Bitpanda Moving Into DeFi With Its Latest Multichain Token System

Pantos, a multichain token system developed by the team at Bitpanda, is launching the public beta of its multichain protocol today.

Users can use this new token standard, dubbed PANDAS (Pantos Digital Asset Standard), to send tokens, wrap coins and create and deploy tokens across multiple chains with very few clicks.

Its beta launch will be trailed on testnets on seven chains — Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB, Cronos, Cleo and Fantom — with plans to integrate into other chains eventually.

Pantos will not have a dedicated blockchain, but rather deploy the same smart contracts across multiple blockchains, Markus Levonyak, a blockchain engineer at Pantos, told Blockworks.

In this case, the two smart contracts that will be deployed in the new token standard are the Pantos Hub contract and the Pantos forwarder.

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

Existing cross-chain communication systems fall into three categories: Consensus light clients, validator-based systems and Optimistic messaging systems.

Pantos will be a validator-based system and the network will be run by Service and Validator Nodes, which will initiate transfer and relay the information to the other chain. During the Public Beta, Pantos will only introduce the Service Nodes to network, meaning that everyone can set it up and run their own service node, he said.

Levonyak notes that Pantos is in the process of full decentralization: “The goal is to have a fully decentralized permissionless system in the end,” he said.

Pantos was born in 2018, as a research project by Bitpanda and two European universities with the goal to create a fully decentralized multichain token transfer and blockchain interoperability system. 

Despite being a centralized company, Bitpanda’s investment in Pantos shows its commitment to a decentralized future, a trend among centralized players.

Coinbase has made moves into staking services, which now makes up over 10% of its revenue, and Binance has also twice launched and promoted a BNB Chain in an attempt to capture the growing activity and developer talent on decentralized blockchains.  

Eric Demuth, chief executive officer and co-founder of Pantos and Bitpanda notes that Pantos isn’t just about DeFi. 

“That’s only half the story,” Demuth told Blockworks. “Currently, communication between different chains is difficult, and any sort of mainstream adoption is unlikely.”

Demuth believes that one of the main headaches for crypto projects today is being tied down to one blockchain.

“If that blockchain falls behind technologically or simply becomes irrelevant, they cannot easily switch to another,” he said. “The newly introduced multichain token standard drastically increases the usability of DeFi which is very much needed.”

Pantos’ latest protocol is designed to tackle the underlying issue of interoperability between coins and token projects, Demuth said.

“We are establishing the first true multi-blockchain token system,” he said.

The system will be competing against a variety of other approaches to cross-chain communications, many of which use existing token standards.

The continued development of blockchain interoperability will be necessary to ensure mainstream adoption, as distributed systems mature and proliferate.

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