Jacquelyn Melinek

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 <li>“Demand has been increasing dramatically this year with many major players realising the value of zero knowledge proofs applied to big data and finance,” CEO Oliver Gale said to Blockworks </li>
 <li>The total value locked on all DeFi protocols is up 1405.5% from $17.34 billion on the year-ago date to $261 billion today, according to data on DeFi Llama</li>
 </ul>
 
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Panther Protocol has raised $22 million after closing a public sale in a partnership with Tokensoft, Oliver Gale, CEO of the company told Blockworks.&nbsp;



The sale took place Tuesday on the protocol’s website and closed in less than 90 minutes, Gale said.



Panther is an end-to-end privacy solution for DeFi and Web3 users on public blockchains. It is currently building on <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/eth-btc-on-the-verge-of-breaking-out-nft-market-may-be-stagnating-markets-wrap/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ethereum</a>, <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/polygon-trust-crypto-economy-etf-hit-the-market/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Polygon</a>, Flare, Avalanche, NEAR and Elrond. Panther also has a cryptocurrency, $ZKP, which is an ERC 20 token issued on the Ethereum blockchain. At the beginning of November, ZKP had about $41 million circulating in market capitalization, the company <a href="https://blog.pantherprotocol.io/the-overview-of-panther-protocols-zkp-tokenomics-is-here-7c07b0853c64" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>. 



“Demand has been increasing dramatically this year with many major players realizing the value of zero-knowledge proofs applied to big data and finance,” Gale said. “This field of research is now the most active and promising solution for secure scaling and private interactions using blockchains,” he added. 



Through the <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/house-republican-sec-commissioner-partner-on-token-sales-policy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">public sale</a>, the protocol will offer greater community engagement and participation in its private, scalable infrastructure, the company said.



“In a progressively decentralized digital world, restoring privacy in DeFi and Web3 equals restoring human privacy for future societies. Something of this magnitude cannot be achieved without massive collaboration, ecosystem development and empowering our communities,” the company wrote in a blog <a href="https://blog.pantherprotocol.io/the-overview-of-panther-protocols-zkp-tokenomics-is-here-7c07b0853c64" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">post</a> prior to the public sale. 



In general, <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/governments-understand-defi-but-are-petrified-of-it/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DeFi</a> protocols have been booming in 2021. The total value locked on all DeFi protocols is up 1405.5% from $17.34 billion on the year-ago date to $261 billion today, according to <a href="https://defillama.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">data</a> on DeFi Llama. 



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<a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/curve-finance-rallies-will-defi-follow/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Curve</a> tops the list with TVL rankings, with $20.59 billion TVL, with MakerDAO and <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/4-2-billion-withdrawn-from-aaves-money-market-protocol/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AAVE</a> ranking in second and third place, respectively, DeFi Llama shows. 



Panther has seen over $500 million worth of interest thanks to unprecedented growth in the DeFi space, Gale said. “That figure is likely much larger in real life as the data was collected one week before the sale, a week in which our community almost doubled,” Gale noted.&nbsp;



In addition to developing a set of application programming interfaces, software development kits and custom integrations, Panther will provide builders privacy features within their apps so they won’t need a highly specialized team of cryptographers and privacy tech engineers to build out these features.&nbsp;



“This raise places Panther where our vision belongs, in the upper echelons of the zero-knowledge space. We are excited to continue to innovate and deliver on the frontier with a mission of improving lives for everyone by restoring privacy rights,” Gale said.



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