AMA with Pantos!
On the 16th of March, 2022 at 3:00 UTC, Decentralized Club had the honor of hosting Marsel Nenaj, Head of Communications at Pantos, for an Ask-Me-Anything session on their Telegram page with a community of over 60,000 people. It was hosted by DC Host, Min.
The session was divided into three segments. Introductions were made in Segment 1, questions from the Twitter community were answered in Segment 2, and live questions from the community members in attendance were answered in Segment 3.
If you missed this event and would like to know what Pantos is all about, you can find a recap of the interview here.
Information here should be researched and should not be taken as investment or financial advice. Also note that slight edits have been made for clarity, and links in this recap lead to images, documents, or other media.
Segment 1 — Introduction
[Min]
Good day everyone, and welcome to today’s Ask Me Anything session with Pantos.
I am Min, your host for today’s AMA.
We have a very special guest with us today, Marsel Nenaj.
[Max]
Thanks for having me, already excited to share some details about the project :)
[Min]
Guten Tag, Marsel!
It’s our pleasure! How are you doing today?
[Max]
amazing, feel like at home already 😁
[Min]
Awesome :))))
https://t.me/decentralized_club/1019173
Can you please introduce yourself to us? What superpower do you have at Pantos?
[Max]
Sure, so a quick introduction of myself: I joined Bitpanda in 2020 after being part of the community for over two years and being active as a moderator. Initially, I was responsible for the community management at Bitpanda and built up the community team from scratch. Last year I joined the Pantos team full-time to help with the go-to-market.
Pantos is a multichain solution which has been initiated by Bitpanda in 2018 as an R&D project. In the last years, we have built up one of the strongest research teams in the field of blockchain interoperability and published dozens of academic papers and several prototypes. Last month we started our public beta which is based on the work of the last few years and showcases our new technology. Pantos enables tokens to seamlessly interact with various blockchains, making them true multichain tokens.
[Min]
I absolutely love success stories! This one is glorious. Well-done!
A teaser, but I’m pumped already! We’re going to learn so much today everyone!
[Min]
Catch up everyone! This train is moving fasttttt
@max_pantos Shall we dive right into the introduction questions?
[Max]
sure sounds good :)
[Min]
Sweet!
Segment 1 — Introduction
Loved the teaser but can you tell us more about Pantos and what makes it unique?
[Max]
What makes Pantos special can be described in just one word: Security. We have been around since 2018, and our research efforts have been tremendous. We built a system that offers a better and more complete user experience compared to traditional bridges. Multichain tokens can natively move between various chains and don’t need to be wrapped. For that reason we also recently announced our very own token standard which is based on the widely known erc-20 standard
[Min]
Simply put, yet important! Security! 👏🏼
Next question 🛬
Can you explain the key features of $PAN and its use cases? How can holders benefit from staking, the testnet and other tokenomics?
[Max]
that is a hot question 🔥
[Min]
Someone call the fire service 🚒🔥
[Max]
$PAN plays an important role in the ecosystem of Pantos, it acts as the gas of the network. This makes a smooth user experience possible, as you can pay with PAN on any of the supported chains for your transfer instead of needing to swap to the different native gas coins. There is no staking yet live, but we will soon introduce service nodes and later also validator nodes, both roles will need PAN to interact with the network. Deployment fees for new multichain tokens launched on top of Pantos are also paid in PAN. We are trying to create a smooth experience for users and developers across all chains to make their lives easier
[Min]
Keyword: Smooth experience! I want it, we all want it!
Up $PAN! 🥳🥳🥳
Third question coming in hottttt! 🔥
What are the key objectives for the team in the short and long term, and what challenges do you anticipate facing along the way?
[Max]
In the short term, our biggest objective is to prepare the protocol for the mainnet launch. During the public beta, we have been able to collect a lot of valuable feedback and we are constantly improving our systems and adding cool new features. Long-term of course the goal is to boost adoption of our improved token standard, the Pantos Digital Asset Standard (PANDAS). Offering anyone the possibility to easily create new native multichain tokens on many chains within minutes, without much integration work.
[Min]
🐼 🐼 🐼
PANDA PANDA PANDA
What Desiigner said! 🎵🎶
Hear that? ANYONE can make a new multichain token in minutes!
Talk about efficiency!
This is all too exciting!
Now I want to know what chains Pantos supports!
[Max]
We currently support seven chains and will soon integrate our eighth. The integrated chains are: Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom, Cronos and Celo
[Min]
Amazing!
[Max]
The next one will be Aurora :)
[Min]
Yessssssss!
https://t.me/decentralized_club/1019210
And here’s the last introduction question for tonight!
What is your roadmap for the development of Pantos?
[Max]
The next milestone on our roadmap is the release of PANDAS together with our client libraries and gradually open sourcing our codebase. As well as the release of our Multichain Token Creator, which will make it extremely easy to develop and deploy your own multichain token on top of Pantos with just a few clicks. This will most likely still happen in Q2 this year. After that, the next major milestone is the release of the service nodes software, as the first step towards the decentralization of the network.
[Max]
The next milestone on our roadmap is the release of PANDAS together with our client libraries and gradually open sourcing our codebase. As well as the release of our Multichain Token Creator, which will make it extremely easy to develop and deploy your own multichain token on top of Pantos with just a few clicks. This will most likely still happen in Q2 this year. After that, the next major milestone is the release of the service nodes software, as the first step towards the decentralization of the network.
[Min]
Roadmap looks golden! Well-done Pantos Team! 👏🏻
The train is now moving to the Twitter Segment!
Ready for the questions from our Twitter community?
[Max]
Yes, I saw there were many amazing questions!
[Min]
Yes yes!
https://t.me/decentralized_club/1019218
Segment 2 — Twitter Questions
[Min]
There are several platforms and projects that have implemented reward programs to encourage the community to detect risks, so, could Pantos Vision in the future implement this proposal? Have you performed internal or external audits to ensure project security?
Twitter Username: @DavidDorrie1
[Max]
Compared to a bridge, Pantos uses a completely different and more advanced approach. Native multichain tokens like PAN are not locked in a contract on the source chain, they can natively move between the chains and for each transfer, there is a burn and mint transaction. In regards to security, there is no such thing as absolute security in IT, but we have put a lot of effort into research and development, and have some of the smartest minds on board in the space. Our research teams are located at TU Wien (Austria) and TU Hamburg (Germany), two of the best universities in Europe. Furthermore, we have a very strict development process and will do audits before the mainnet launch.
We are currently working on the set-up for our Bug Bounty program, we think it is a useful tool to further improve the security of the protocol. I can’t share any exact details yet, as we haven’t made it public yet. There are already some good examples of bug bounty programs from other projects in the space, our program will be similar. Furthermore, we also want to incentivize community contributions of all kinds and are working on some cool community bounties and other activities to promote the Pantos ecosystem.
[Min]
This is really impressive!
Did someone say incentives? Sign us up!
https://t.me/decentralized_club/1019225
Everyone! Join in
You don’t want to miss the announcement!!! 🥳
[Min]
You point out that “Users have the option of keeping their savings in the long term in a more secure and decentralized chain”, but what really makes the Pantos network more secure than the other networks on the blockchain?
Twitter Username: @Gutike95s
[Max]
I think I partially answered that already in my previous answers, so it is of course a combination of some factors. First of all we are using a very strict approach when it comes to the development of the product. It is very important to properly design the system and test it thoroughly before releasing anything to mainnet. Bridges also promised to solve this problem, but created new lock-ins and risks associated. For us it is really important to reduce the associated risks as much as possible and build a future-proof solution
[Min]
Great strategy! 👏🏻
I saw that many projects were unstable for a short period of time. At first, they started with hard work & good attention, but a few months later they didn’t pay attention to this project. Then it ended there. How do you plan to survive in the market?
Twitter Username: @Tonystar75
[Max]
I think in that regard, we have a quite good track record. As a project initiated by Bitpanda in 2018, we have strong backing and are in the market for five years now. The project has been set up right from the beginning to be long-term and not compromise on security and sustainability. It was and is very important for us to develop a reliable solution. We have seen that many projects have not been able to survive long-term because they wasted their funds on marketing instead of developing sustainable products. We still have all ICO funds available for long-term funding and growth of the project, as the project has been funded with the help of Bitpanda so far.
[Min]
Takeaway: Develop sustainable products!
Good one from the Pantos Head of Communications!
What are the advantages of Pantos? I believe security is one of the most important to consider before investing in a Project. So can you tell us what the security measures have done so far? Have you done your audit? Would you mind sharing it with us?
Twitter Username: @desejiking
[Max]
Security is our top priority. As I previously mentioned, we have a very strong research team and also some security experts on board, for example, Matteo Maffei is one of the most renowned blockchain security researchers worldwide and part of the Pantos team. He and the team also made the news for some improvements to the lightning protocol. Audits haven’t been conducted, as the protocol is still not finalized yet, but we are already in talks with several auditors and there will be a thorough security check before we launch on the mainnet.
[Min]
Pantos is BIG on security! I haven’t met a lot of teams that emphasize on this. Many are focused on marketing, like you said previously, and fail to build systems that sustain their products and offerings.
Looking forward to hearing news about your audit!
Community, please keep up with the Pantos Team here:
I read about Pantos but found nothing about your project token and that left me wondering if you didn’t have one. So, does your project currently have a token? If so, can you tell us about it and the different features it has in your ecosystem?
Twitter Username: @CarlosBrathwaite
[Max]
The PAN token is currently just an ERC-20 token on Ethereum only, as the technology hasn’t been released on the mainnet yet. But you can already trade PAN and it is currently available on Bitpanda, Bitpanda Pro, and HitBTC. There are also some community-driven Uniswap pools. The PAN token plays a vital role and is needed as Stake for nodes for example, but also to launch your multichain token or initiate a transfer, as mentioned earlier.
[Min]
Amazing news!
If you’re joining this session, REMEMBER, only click verified links from @PantosIO_EN.
Stay safe everyone!
And that wraps up the Twitter Segment!
Let’s give a minute for the community to prepare excellent questions!
Only five people will be answered so make it good! Reallllyyy good!
AMA Rules for the community:
https://t.me/decentralized_club/1019247
[Max]
Live questions are the best part of any AMA :)
[Min]
Yes! This is THE MOST anticipated part of our AMAs. So anticipated that many people only join this part to get rewards, sadly. And we want to reward those that have been with us since the start of today’s AMA and have been paying rapt attention, right?
Here’s what we do! We use a special keyword in the questions. Helps filter out copied, generic and vague questions.
Marsel, what’s your absolute favourite sport?
[Max]
Football ⚽️of course 😁
[Min]
Haha! Favorite team?
[Max]
Mhm there are a lot of good teams out there, hard to decide :)
[Min]
Playing safe! I likeeeee :)))))
Dear active community, this is today’s keyword below! Fill it in and use it in your questions. The guest will only pick the questions with the correct keywords.
Pantos rep, [*GUEST NAME*] is awesome and loves [*SPORT NAME*]
Let the questions rainnnnn!
— -Chat was then opened for the live community to send in their questions —
Segment 3 — Live Questions
[Min]
Dear guest, this keyword:
Pantos rep, [*GUEST NAME*] is awesome and loves [*SPORT NAME*]
has been completed correctly and added to questions by the community members to show they were paying attention.
Please prioritise such questions 🥳
@max_pantos
[Max]
Amazing, I will check now and pick some of the best questions :)
[Min]
Awesome! 🥳
[CRAZY BOY]
You mentioned that “Pantos wants to return value to the crypto community and promote cooperation rather than competition between different networks and projects”, but how do you avoid competitions? Could it be that it puts limitations on the time it uses its technology?
[Max]
Our long-term vision is simple: we want to establish technology-agnostic tokens for everyone and introduce seamless interoperability between the chains. This would make it also possible for traditional finance to tokenise real world assets and have a future-proof solution. We are not afraid of other projects, on the contrary we welcome new approaches and developments and we have designed Pantos also to be flexible and be able to adjust to changes in the landscape in the coming years. During our years of research, we have already evaluated many approaches and we see the development of such software as an evolutionary process.
[Kitty BTC 😼]
How many blockchains will a Pantos-based token be compatible with? With anyone we want, even non-EVM?
MAX is awesome and loves FOOTBALL
[Max]
We will constantly add new chains, we are looking into non-evm chains as well. I cannot give you a definite number of chains that we will support, it will be mostly based on the adoption of the chains in the long-term.
[Steffi]
I saw about CDL-BOT on your platform. So can you tell us more about CDL-BOT? What does this have to do with your platform and what benefits does CDL-BOT bring to the Pantos ecosystem?
[Max]
CDL-BOT is our research lab which has been launched together with the financial support of the Austrian state. The name stands for Christian Doppler Laboratory for Blockchain Technologies and the Internet of things. Another research aim of the lab is to make Distributed Ledger Technologies suitable for applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) together.
[Min]
Keep ’em coming! 🥳
[Memo]
I understand that the beta version is running, so could you tell us how we can participate in it? Will we have to make any investment? And how can we generate income with Pantos? Max football
[Max]
The beta is completely free and live only on testnets: https://app.testnet.pantos.io and our faucet is available at https://faucet.testnet.pantos.io You can head over to our announcement blog (https://medium.com/@PantosIO/the-public-beta-is-here-all-you-need-to-know-8adc2112a97b) to learn more about it and also check out our documentation: pantos.gitbook.io/
[Min]
These answers are so good!
Please answer as many questions as possible from our community 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
This deserves to be pinned!
[Zeynep]
Such a solid team you have, truly. I noticed most of the team is from Bitpanda. Although I’m not sure how Bitpanda and Pantos (and BEST) work together? Is it like a Facebook, Instagram under Meta situation? Or are Bitpanda and Pantos two different parent companies? 🤔
Pantos rep, [*Marsel*] is awesome and loves [*Football*]
[Max]
Pantos is a company of Bitpanda. The good thing is that we can use the already existing teams at Bitpanda and save a lot of resources everytime we need them, but our development team is still independent and focuses solely on the development of Pantos.
I think I’ll need a short coffee break after so many interesting questions 🤯
[Min]
You deserve the finest brew after this session but please keep goingggg 😁😁😁
[Space Dan]
MAX|| FOOTBALL
With only two lines of code, will developers be able to implement smart contracts implemented in other blockchains? For example, how can they enforce contracts on Ethereum?
[Max]
This is a really exciting field, it is not yet part of the product, but we are definitely looking into enabling cross-chain smart contracts as well in the future. But as said, secure solutions take their time and we definitely want to build it the right way
I’ll pick one final questions
[Dominik]
Max is awesome and loves football.
Question: You mentioned mainnet in the short term period. Is mainnet likely to be in 2023?
[Max]
We haven’t set a date yet for the mainnet launch as it depends on the previous milestones. We will have another roadmap update later this year and maybe there will be a surprise for the community in it :)
[Min]
Aaaannndd it’s a wrap! 🥳
You have been an absolute delight to interview! @max_pantos
Precise answers from an experienced representative at an impressive project! Pantos is solid!
Any closing remarks before you get that coffee?
[Max]
It was my pleasure to be here, thanks a lot for having me and I really enjoyed answering all those exciting questions :)
[Min]
This is a standing ovation for you and for Pantos!
https://t.me/decentralized_club/1019615
[Min]
It was my pleasure to host you and a super super extra pleasure to learn about Pantos today!
On behalf of my community, I’d like to shout out to the team at Pantos/Bitpanda! You’re all superstars!
I wish you the very best with the audit and mainnet launch!
If your question wasn’t answered, please send it to the @PantosIO_EN group and I’m sure someone will speedily answer you.
It’s been an exciting ride tonight. Thank you all for joining us on this AMA.
@max_pantos, thank you and see you back here sooooon hopefully!
I’m Min, your host with the most, signing out.
The AMA with Pantos is now over.