The prospect of merging the realms of traditional finance and DeFi carries profound implications for each. Blockchain wields the ability to solve the inefficiencies in cross-border payments and business financing, which in turn opens the floodgates to allow a torrent of new capital into the crypto ecosystem, enabling DeFi to emerge from its crypto-focused cocoon and thrive.
Persistence was created to usher in this financial paradigm shift by providing the tools for seamless institutional DeFi adoption whilst also catering to crypto-native users. This is achieved by using NFTs to tokenize real-world assets (such as invoices) which can be used by companies as collateral for acquiring loans and traded on decentralized marketplaces.
Our mission has attracted the support of a plethora of industry VC heavyweights including Arrington XRP Capital, LuneX Ventures (crypto arm of Golden Gate Ventures), IOSG Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, Woodstock Fund, Incrypt (crypto arm of First Principles VC), Genesis Block HK, Moonrock Capital, NGC Ventures, AU21 Capital and Amplifi Capital.
“A core goal of Arrington XRP Capital is to assist blockchain innovators to create value in the real-world. The merging of blockchain and fintech is beginning to usher in a new era of open finance which is poised to transform global finance mechanisms. Persistence is shaping up to be a major building block in this financial revolution and we’re proud to be supporting their journey.”
– Michael Arrington – Founder of Arrington XRP Capital, TechCrunch and Crunchbase
Investors also include Persistence ecosystem partners Alameda Research, Terraform Labs and 3Commas, top-tier industry validators Dokia Capital, SG-1 Validator, Cosmostation and TRG Capital, and prominent industry personalities Richard Ma (Founder of Quantstamp) and Danish Chaudhry (Head of Bitcoin.com Exchange).
Backed by a strong network of early supporters, we are now ready to pursue our mission with full vigour.
DeFi and traditional finance: a critically mutually beneficial merger
Aside from recent efforts at digitization and the development of alternative forms of lending such as P2P lending, the mechanisms of global financing have remained largely unchanged for thousands of years. This has led to great inefficiency and prohibitive barriers to entry. The solution lies with blockchain; tokenizing real-world assets is a critical enabler for the digital economy.
Persistence is providing the means for institutions to seamlessly enter the DeFi space and for traditional companies to access funding via blockchain. By tokenizing real-world assets to use as collateral, businesses can secure financing from institutions in a much more efficient and cost-effective manner. But is there demand for such a new system of decentralized value transfer? In our post-financial crisis world, increasingly so.
In this era of negative interest rates, there is a rapidly growing amount of capital looking for innovative ways to generate yield. At the same time, 80% of cross-border trades require financing, which SMEs find difficult to secure. Persistence is providing a platform to connect the two parties whilst also combatting the costly traditional problems of potential fraud and long settlement times for cross-border payments.
Within the cryptosphere, DeFi is beginning to blossom. The amount of value locked in DeFi protocols has risen sharply in the past few months to well over $10B, with the overall stablecoin market capitalization quadrupling to $20B since February of this year. DeFi, however, will remain a drop in the ocean compared to traditional financial markets whilst it’s confined exclusively to the realm of crypto assets.
The collective market cap of the crypto industry is less than 0.01% of the traditional economy. For the blockchain and crypto industry to reach the multi-trillion dollar mark and truly thrive, we need to move beyond the ‘speculative’ phase into the ‘value creation phase’ by solving real-world problems via asset tokenization.
The Persistence tech stack provides the infrastructure to effectively bridge the decentralized and traditional financial realms in a variety of areas. The flagship DApp in the Persistence ecosystem is Comdex, an institutional-facing commodities trading and trade financing platform, which has integrated with Western Union for multi-region instant fiat on/off ramp and has already handled over $39M in transaction volume since its launch — bringing more assets on chain than our (longer-established) competitors combined.
We have provided the building blocks, and institutional adoption is already beginning to flow in.
Onwards to a new financial paradigm
Comdex, though already a functioning application, will be going live on the Persistence mainnet later this year. We are also building a crypto native-facing application known as the ‘Persistence dApp’, which will bring similar financing products to stablecoin holders through stablecoin liquidity pools, allowing them to generate returns on their capital. This is only the face of the innovation taking place within the Persistence ecosystem.
The Persistence SDK has been built in a modular way to support the trading and financing of assets covering the end-to-end trader journey, and it has not gone unnoticed by other financial innovators. There are already multiple third-party developer teams utilizing Persistence’s tech stack to build next-gen solutions for bringing a variety of real-world assets on chain.
With the closure of our fundraising rounds, we are preparing to launch an innovative community initiative to provide the crypto community with access and exposure to XPRT token in advance of our public sale.
XPRT carries a variety of use cases within the Persistence ecosystem, including participating in staking to contribute to network security, and community governance of the Persistence mainchain. As a ‘work’ token, XPRT also accrues value in direct correlation to increased financial activity within Persistence’s ecosystem dApps.
Details of the community initiative will be revealed via our socials in the coming days. Stay tuned!👀
“We’ve laid the technical groundwork for a new era of blockchain-powered real-world value creation and we have built a strong network of strategic partners. It’s time to push ahead full-force on our mission to bring institutions and real-world assets to DeFi to help the industry to reach its full potential.”
– Tushar Aggarwal, Co-Founder & CEO — Persistence
Get ready for a new financial paradigm.
About Persistence
Persistence is a Tendermint-based, specialised Layer-1 network powering an ecosystem of DeFi applications focused on unlocking the liquidity of staked assets.
Persistence facilitates the issuance and deployment of liquid-staked stkASSETs, allowing users to earn staking rewards while participating in DeFi primitives, such as lending/borrowing and liquidity provisioning on DEXs.
Persistence aims to offer a seamless staking and DeFi experience for PoS (Proof-of-Stake) users and enable developers to build innovative applications around stkASSETs.
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