Persistence

Founder's Journey CEO Tushar Aggarwal founded Persistence in Q2 2019, and the project officially came out of stealth on Jan 3, 2020. However the genesis of Persistence was years in the making, with Aggararwal starting his crypto journey back in 2017. While living in Singapore he began by putting out his Decrypt Asia podcast, and subsequently was brought on by Golden Gate Ventures as the first associate at their crypto centric fund, Lunex. Over the next year and a half he was exposed to the wave of entrepreneurs and crypto start ups popping up in Asia, particularly in his home country of India, several of whom would join him to build Persistence.

Early Projects & Fundraising The first element of what would become Persistence is the commodity marketplace Comdex, which was originally developed by a separate team of entrepreneurs in Singapore. Persistence partnered with Comdex to create a decentralized version of the application, which focused on streamlining cross border transactions and expanding access to financing for smaller commodity trading firms. Persistence brought the platform on chain by creating NFTs for invoices, enabling quicker execution, and an immutable ledger of transactions. It would become the first 3rd party dApp to be integrated into the network via Persistence's SDK, and was a crucial source of fundraising to get Persistence off the ground.

Along with cofounder and CTO Deepanshu Tripanthi, Aggarwal decided early on that Tendermint and Cosmos was perferable to a private blockchain, seeing the interoperability of a public proof of stake chain as a key to future expansion. After deciding to build on Cosmos, the next step was creating the Persistence SDK and in turn the other dApps that would build out the ecosystem This building was facilitated by fundraising from the Comdex validator community, as the onset of the pandemic and the March 2020 market downturn made VC funding hard to come by. In May, again in need of capital, Persistence went down the IDO route, offering participants 100% commission foundation nodes on the upon launch of the mainnet,and future discounts on XPRT tokens. Through this IDO Persistence secured the necessary funding to build out their SDK and continue towards launching an independent layer 1 network. When the DeFI summer bull market arose, Persistence was able to raise an additional $3.7 million in capital and expand into the infrastructure side of PoS with Audit.one.

Ecosystem Expansion and Becoming a Layer 1 Persistence's next milestone was the launch of Audit.one in Q2 2020, a staking as a service provider focused on decentralization and security. Quickly becoming a key contributor to the Cosmos ecosystem, Audit.one received the largest delegation of ATOMs from Tendermint's October 2020 redistribution, cementing Persistence as one of the key players in Cosmos and the wider PoS ecosystem. Since then it has grown into one of the largest validators in South Asia, currently operating nodes for over 20 PoS chains such as Terra, Cosmos, and Solana, as well as the Peristence network, with over $300 million of assets under delegation.

The growth narrative continued in 2021 with the launch of Persistence mainnet on March 30, establishing Persistence as a true layer 1 network. The network runs on a delegated PoS model using the Tendermint practical byzantine fault tolerance consensus engine. Shortly after in July, the DeFi world was introduced to Persistence's liquid staking solution, pStake. This application allows users to mint 1 to 1 pegged tokens for their staked PoS assets, unlocking the ability to earn yields in the wider DeFi ecosystem, while still earning the staking rewards on their initial assets. Currently ATOM and XPRT are the only staking tokens supported, with plans to expand to ETH and SOL in 2022. The liquid staking tokens recieved from this process are usable on the Ethereum network for defi functions such as supplying liquidity and posting loan collateral. pStake is currently the main focus of Persistence, as they aim to become the liquid staking hub of the wider PoS ecosystem.

The fourth component of Persistence is AssetMantle, which takes the marketplace building experience gained from Comdex and applies it to an entirely different asset class. This project is still under development, but aims to be a one stop shop for the ever-expanding NFT community, offering a creator hub, as well as a marketplace. Described as "Shopify for NFTs" this hub will allow creators to set up their own store, and plans to differentiate itself with multichain access, both fiat and token payments, and low minting fees. The project is currently in the testnet phase, with a mainnet launch on the roadmap for 2022.

One Token For Diverse Exposure Tying this whole ecosystem together is the XPRT token, the staking of which provides exposure to the multiple asset classes within Persistence's ecosystem; synthetics, liquid staking, staking infrastructure, and NFTs. XPRT enables stakers to receive a transaction volume based share the fees generated by these dApps, and is also used as the governance token for voting on ecosystem wide proposals.