Persistence & EncryptClub AMA Recap
Judy_Host of EncryptClub: It is reported that India had made changes to the Companies Act, 2013, requiring companies to disclose their dealings in cryptocurrencies. I don’t think people are very willing to be engaged with the cryptocurrency market if these rules are fully implemented. In my opinion, crypto asset transfer can’t be actually banned unless all the internet, all the bluetooth, and a certain range of local area network were cut off.
Today, we will have AMA with Persistence which held an AMA with EncryptClub in late 2020. Persistence is to initially launch on AscendEX and open up mining at the same time. Abhitej Singh, Strategy and Community of Persistence will join our AMA and share more information about this project.
Welcome to EncryptClub, Abhitej. Would you please introduce yourselves to the audience?
Abhitej: Hello Everyone, I am Abhitej Singh and I take care of Strategy and Community at @Persistenceone. My introduction to Crypto was in 2016–2017 while I was travelling across different parts of India and the US. I was very fascinated by the core characteristics of Crypto and Blockchain in general — ownership and transparency. So, after initial introduction I jumped into Crypto completely in late 2018.
Before joining Persistence, I was helping a couple of early stage startups (now backed by Ola and Livspace — unicorns in India). I was also actively involved building communities for Google, facebook and co-founded national hackathon in India called Code2Create.
I met Tushar and Deepanshu in 2019 at a Blockchain Conference and really liked the vision they had and joined them back in November 2019. Here we are building @PersistenceOne.
I also co-founded Cosmos India with Tushar and Deepanshu.
Learn about our journey so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPHOZPsoEnQ
Thanks for your introduction, Abhitej. Here comes our AMA session.
Q1: Persistence used to hold an AMA with EncryptClub months ago and is about to launch its circulating token soon. With the market trend shifting from DeFi to NFT, has Persistence made some adjustment in road map and technology, and developed new functionalities to better accommodate the evolving market?
Abhitej: Persistence is an interoperable protocol built to facilitate the creation of next-gen financial products. The Persistence tech stack provides the infrastructure to effectively bridge the realms of DeFi and traditional finance in a variety of areas, whilst also enabling the creation of innovative crypto-facing solutions to expand the DeFi and NFT sectors.
Persistence is operating at the confluence of NFTs + DeFi + PoS Staking. We have already developed a full suite of financial products:
♦️Comdex: Institutional-facing commodities trading and trade financing platform. Handled over $55M in transaction volume.
♦️AUDIT.one: Staking-as-a-service infrastructure. Currently over $200M in assets under management.
♦️pStake: Liquid staking product unlocking liquidity of staked assets.
♦️pLend: Stablecoin lending platform backed by real-world assets.
♦️Asset Mantle: Interoperable NFT marketplace framework, enabling the creation of ‘Shopify-style’ NFT marketplaces.
Know more about our product ecosystem here: https://www.chainnews.com/articles/463149089664.htm
Q2: Adopting DPoS mechanism in its underlying public chain, Persistence needs nodes support in its early stage. Has Persistence completed its nodes building yet? How to become a Persistence node?
Abhitej:Persistence is launching it’s mainnet on 30th March and has onboarded the world’s best validators to join as the genesis nodes. In total there will be 20 genesis nodes (including 15 Validator node + 5 Foundation nodes).
The validators include following:
1. Cosmostation
2. Dokia Capital
3. Stake.fish
4. Figment
5. Bitmax
6. Huobi Pool
7. P2P Validator
8. Band Protocol
9. AUDIT.one
10. StakeWith.Us
11. HashQuark
12. Tavis Digital
13. DSRV Labs
14. SG-1
15. Kalpatech
Our validators collectively secure $7B+ worth of assets and are among the top validators among networks such as Cosmos, Polkadot, NEAR etc.
Currently, we are not accepting any new validators to the genesis set but soon we will be allowing self-staked validators to join the Persistence chain mainnet. Any interested team/individual can fill the Validator form: https://forms.gle/EcHn9W9JADTaPXGHA or join our discord community: https://discord.com/invite/SaBKpjbnhH.
Q3：What is the cooperation model between Persistence and Cosmos? How will Cosmos shift value from traditional finance to DeFi via Persistence?
Abhitej: Persistence is a Tendermint-based chain with ability to connect with multiple chains/ecosystems through bridges (Ethereum bridge already live).
Why did we choose Cosmos to build on?
The Cosmos SDK not only allows Persistence the ability to take advantage of the ‘Inter-blockchain Communication Module’ (IBC) launched by Cosmos, but also allows for Persistence to create its own ecosystem of application specific chains which leads to an exponentially higher level of scalability.
Through the use of the Cosmos IBC module, stablecoins from various networks integrated with the Cosmos IBC can be interoperably transacted on the Persistence App where these assets can be deployed to finance real world commodity trades.
In addition, the Cosmos Hub/Zone structure allows for applications built on Persistence to have their own chain (zone) for application specific transactions while transactions pertaining to the native Persistence token occur on the hub.
Leveraging Cosmos SDK, we have developed Persistence SDK which allows to cater to the requirements of institutions such as privacy, abstraction of token on the application layer, KYC/AML. With the advantage of blockchain while having Web2.0 user-experience the institutions can offer better solutions to their clients/users. This also opens up opportunities for the institutions to make use of the excess liquidity in Crypto through our applications such as Comdex, pLend etc. This will give fair idea of our tech stack and how we are building cross-chain ecosystem.
That being said, Persistence is a multi-chain ecosystem with it’s application residing on multiple chains and interoperating through IBC bridges. Currently our applications are compatible with Ethereum, Tendermint-based chains [Cosmos, Terra, Iris Etc] and native Persistence Chain.
On the other note, we are also working with institutions to offer DeFi and Staking-as-a-Service to their investors. We recently partnered with the digital arm billion dollar Swiss asset management fund, Tavis Digital, to bring more traditional capital into Crypto.
See more here: http://coindesk.com/staking-as-an-asset-class-this-swiss-institutional-fund-is-jumping-in
Q4：It is officially reported that Persistence will be initially launched on AscendEX on April 1st. Why not initially launch XPRT via IDO on DEX?
Abhitej: We wanted to launch a Tendermint-based token in order to offer the staking for the XPRT right from the start. In absence of a DEX on Cosmos ecosystem we had to take support from AscendEX.
In recent past, AsecendEX (formerly Bitmax) launched another successful tenement-based project, Akash Network. Persistence token and staking economics is very similar to that of Akash Network, hence AscendEX (Bitmax) was a natural choice.
The staking rewards on XPRT from day one will be 35% APR which is one of the best in the industry. We also aim to offer Liquid Staking for XPRT through our app pStake in order to make it more lucrative to hold XPRT.
You can find the details related to Token listing on AscendEx on April 1st here: https://bitmaxhelp.zendesk.com/hc/zh-cn/articles/1500004962562
Q5: Can you share us more information about pStake (liquid staking) product? How to participate in it?
Abhitej: pStake is undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated Liquid Staking dapp which not only provides liquidity but also replicates the underlying network’s governance. To emphasise more on why pStake will positively impact the staking ecosystem:
- Decreasing the barriers to Staking: Most of the PoS assets are not staked today due to issues such as liquidity but pStake’s redemption model provides instant liquidity without impacting the network security
- Enabling cross-chain ecosystem: Through pStake token holders of different PoS assets will be able to bring their assets to Ethereum, this will significantly grow the adoption of PoS ecosystem.
- Additional rewards: The users will be able to earn LP Rewards or other DeFi incentives in addition to their staking rewards.
We will be releasing pStake towards the end of April or early May. Our goal is to start with one PoS network and then expand to multiple networks.
We have made a brave decision to launch our mainnet + token + staking at the same time. We just kickstarted our Genesis transaction collection for mainnet launch with our genesis validators. https://buff.ly/2P8iSRf. The token listing is on April 1st and everyone will be able to acquire $XPRT then.
The holders of ATOM, $DOT, $NEAR etc will be able to do the following:
1. Get liquidity for their staked assets
2. Bring their assets from native chains to Ethereum, for example $DOT from Polkadot to Ethereum
3. Earn very high LP Rewards
Here comes the free QA session, guest can choose 1–2 questions from the audience to give a brief reply.
User1:Could you give more info about your team, are they capable for realizing NFT+DEFI+POS Staking?
Abhitej: The team is highly capable and the multiple grants and global recognition for the team are the testament for the same. Some of the recent updates that will provide you insights about the capabilities of the team:
PoS Staking: http://coindesk.com/staking-as-an-asset-class-this-swiss-institutional-fund-is-jumping-in
Community: https://blog.cosmos.network/cosmos-community-microgrants-wrap-up-2020-514c6a5d4fe2
User2: What achievement has you made so far?
Abhitej: Some of the key achievements will be:
1. Strong partnerships with leading protocols, networks and wallets
2. Expanded team to 20+ members
3. ICF awarded grant to Persistence to develop inter-chain NFT standards and we are leading the global working group which includes Polkadot, Kusama, Secret Network, Keep Network, Cosmos etc
4. Launched AUDIT.one [$300 Million in total assets under delegation] and Comdex [$55 Million in total transaction volume]
5. Launched StakeDrop with 7 networks — Cosmos, Polkadot, Tezos, Terra, Kava, Iris and Polygon and already have 3000+ participating who have staked more than $1 Billion worth of assets to earn $XPRT tokens.
6. Onboarded world’s best validators securing $7B+ assets collectively including but not limited to stakefish, Dokia Capital, P2P Network, Figment, Sikka
Read about our journey so far [Till January 2021]: https://buff.ly/395mpp2
Judy_Host of EncryptClub: Thank Abhitej for joining our AMA and sharing so much valuable information with us. Thank you all for watching this AMA. EncryptClub will work hard and bring more wonderful content for you in future.
