Blockchain

DeFi Products for Crypto Users; Interview with Tushar Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Persistence

Persistence

In this interview with Tushar Aggarwal, the CEO of Persistence, he shares more details on how Persistence is building an ecosystem of next-gen financial products to serve both institutional investors and crypto-native users.

Please tell us more about yourself?

Hi, my name is Tushar Aggarwal. I am an early member of LuneX Ventures,and the Founder and CEO of Persistence, a multi-chain DeFi ecosystem bringing different asset classes such as PoS assets and Commodity synthetics into DeFi. 

What is Persistence and what services are you providing?

Persistence is an ecosystem of multi-chain DeFi products designed to stimulate global liquidity and enable seamless value exchange. Persistence is bringing different asset classes into DeFi through its products – Proof-of-Stake assets (pSTAKE), Commodities synthetic assets (Comdex) and NFT assets (Asset Mantle).

Persistence’s Core mainnet is a Proof-of-Stake chain powered by Tendermint BFT consensus engine. Persistence multi-chain tech stack (currently supporting Cosmos, Ethereum and other Tendermint-based chains) abstracts away the complexities for developers and enables them to create DEXs, marketplaces, lending/borrowing platforms etc. 

A division of Persistence is also working on developing inter-chain NFT and Metadata standards along with leading Proof-of-Stake networks/foundations.

What is the technology behind the Persistence Protocol, could you give us a walkthrough of the ecosystem?

In terms of the protocol itself, so all of these products pSTAKE, Comdex and Asset Mantle, they’re all being supported by the Persistence infrastructure in the background, along with bridges to Ethereum and Cosmos based on the application use-cases. From our perspective, we initially started building Ethereum, but realized that there were a lot of scalability issues and issues around privacy with Ethereum, which then led us to be early adopters of the proof of stake world and Cosmos/Tendermint BFT being one of the first dedicated proof of stake chains in production. We became Cosmos community members and have been very active in that space. Persistence is essentially a Tendermint-based chain and the Persistence SDK is based off of Cosmos SDK.

By merging financial products for both institutional and crypto-native users, what difference are you making?

In the crypto space, but even in traditional finance, the difference between retail and institutions is getting narrower and narrower. You have many retail folks that do a lot of due diligence and sometimes more due diligence than the institutional folks. I think we’ve seen that with what happened with GME stock and Wall Street Bets. We’re living through a time where hyper financialization of the world is taking place. In that respect, with crypto, I think we see that on steroids, where a lot of retail folks end up doing a lot more due diligence than most of the institutional investors. Obviously, institutional investors have access to a lot of early-stage deals and things like that.  A lot of activity is driven by retail as well. In terms of the difference we are making, we initially started building products for institutions but realized that there was a very grassroot bottom-up movement in crypto. So we’ve shifted our focus towards more retail and then using adoption by retail to drive institutional interest, because crypto is one unique asset class where if there is retail interest institutions come automatically. 

What is next on your roadmap and any available opportunities for investors and partners at Persistence?

We just launched our pSTAKE application very recently. We’ve done a capped launch, so up to 22nd august, only 125,000 ATOMs (which represents about $1.25 million worth of ATOMs) can be minted on pSTAKE. After August 22nd, we’ll be doing an uncapped launch. 

In terms of community members and investors, and partners opportunities, obviously a few things are just getting exposure to the XPRT token, which is currently trading on AscenDEX( previously BitMax), Gate.io and a newly launched decentralized exchange called Osmosis (within the Cosmos ecosystem). We will be trading on Gravity DEX, which is another decentralized exchange which is being launched by the Cosmos team and obviously in parallel we are doing listings on multiple other avenues to have a broad set of folks holding our token. 

You can stake this token to take part in consensus-driven through other points. The current staking is about 35 percent, and that could be halving every two years. I think the upside of just getting exposure to Persistence. The other thing is using pSTAKE applications, if you go to app.pSTAKE.finance. Right now, we have launched for ATOM exclusively, but as I said, we will be expanding to other Tendermint based coins and other assets over the next few weeks and months.  So I think that is the next way that different market participants can be involved in the Persistence ecosystem.

Tell us more about your team of financial experts and customer support, what makes you special?

We have a team of about 32 people across the board. On the business side, where our teams are horizontal, we have teams including research, design, growth, marketing, compliance, and finance. So they work across the different products that we have. And then, the product team is more vertical, which means that each product has its sort of mini CTO or product manager. And then whether you need developers on the Solidity side, Golang or Rust, just depending on which programming language they’re using for a particular product or if we need to evolve for a specific product, those guys kind of chip in for those specific products.

For more information, visit the website: Persistence.one

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