Privacy coins and zero-knowledge technology, which some use to obfuscate the identity of sends/receivers and transaction amounts, have gained enormous popularity in recent years due to mounting regulatory surveillance against the crypto sector. But despite their rapid rise in market cap, critics continue to scrutinize such class of assets as enablers for masking illicit activities.

In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Oliver Gale, CEO, and co-founder of the Panther Protocol (ZKP), elaborated on the technology behind its privacy decentralized finance, or DeFi, solutions and why it's necessary for today's crypto space:

CT: How much did you raise from your recent token sale, and what does your roadmap look like from here?

OG: We've raised over $30 million in total. For Panther protocol, we did several private sale rounds, and then we did a public sale on November the 23rd, which was 90 minutes long, and raised over $20 million during that time. The second question is around the roadmap itself, so Panther Protocol is a multi-chain privacy protocol with several zero-knowledge, data disclosure tools built into it; what we're delivering in January is our minimum viable product (MVP).

We have multiple deployments this month. And that will be delivering an MVP that allows staking on Polygon and transferability of the ERC-20 token to ZKP token. And then, I estimate 30 to 60 days later; we're going to deploy the complete v1.0 MVP, which will have the multi-asset privacy pools and multi-asset staking pools that are the shielded tools in which Panther assets can use be transacted privately. And that will also come with a version of ZK reveals, which is the mechanism by which users can voluntarily disclose their transaction data