Dear Persistence supporters and community,
Persistence came out of stealth on January 3rd 2020, marking its second anniversary earlier this year. Over the past two years while building our network and ecosystem, the team has fought hard to raise capital, navigated a global pandemic, and faced challenges with product iterations. What has kept us going is our commitment to the values we have been built upon:
Humility, Integrity, Patience and Persistence!
So here we are, looking optimistically into the face of another fresh year, excited to tackle meaningful challenges to push the broader space forward while enabling unforeseen growth of the Persistence ecosystem at large.
With that note, I would hereby like to take this opportunity to shed some light on the highlights of the past two years and share with you our goals for 2022.
Our Journey Thus Far
The Early Days
- Q1’20: Initial team building and coming out of stealth
- Q1’20: Unsuccessful fundraise attempt (2020 Black Thursday Crash)
- Q2’20: Launch of AUDIT.one, Persistence’s validator arm (to generate staking rewards and remain sustainable)
- Q2’20: Token Swap between Terra and Persistence — as a way to capitalize Persistence and keep building (huge thanks to the Terra team and community!)
- Q3’20: Successful strategic fundraise for Persistence
Product Foundations
- Q4’20: StakeDrop campaign for ATOM, LUNA, KAVA and MATIC stakers — attracting participation of >$1B worth of PoS assets (>$3B at current prices)
- Q4’20: StakeDrop leads to the ideation of pSTAKE Finance (liquid staking protocol)
- Q1’21: Persistence Core-1 mainnet goes live
- Q1’21: Persistence Wallet and Persistence Explorer are launched
- Q1’21: $XPRT commences trading via an IEO on AscendEx
- Q2’21: pSTAKE Finance Alpha (Testnet) launch
Ecosystem Expansion
- Q2’21: $XPRT commences trading on Osmosis, the first DEX in the Cosmos ecosystem
- Q3’21: pSTAKE uncapped product launch following security audits
- Q3’21: $XPRT commences trading on Huobi
- Q3’21: Decentralization of Persistence Core-1 chain through validator set expansion
- Q4’21: pSTAKE secures $10M in funding from leading global investors
- Q4’21: pSTAKE conducts CoinList public sale, attracting record 949,000 registrants
- Q4’21: Persistence team expands to 30+ members
The vision of Persistence has always been to bootstrap a flourishing ecosystem through a range of financial instruments and use-cases.
Fun fact: The domain extension ‘.one’ (Persistence.one) was chosen as opposed to .network or .protocol for exactly this reason; the Persistence network/protocol being only one part of the broader Persistence ecosystem.
We have spent the last two years gathering the different pieces of the puzzle and now we are all set to put all those pieces together.
What the New Year Holds
There are two fundamental areas that we will focus on this year — fostering a holistic ecosystem of applications and cultivating the expansion of organisational capabilities.
Applications and Services
Ecosystem growth will be targeted through a two-pronged approach:
In-house
All initiatives in-house will focus primarily on driving innovation around staking and liquid staking.
Persistence Chain (Core-1) & $XPRT
- Make the Persistence chain more decentralised and robust to support ecosystem dApps
- Increase XPRT holder base to >100,000 wallets (currently 23,000+)
- Incentivise builders to build on the Persistence chain, expanding dApp ecosystem
- Asset issuance of stkATOM and stkXPRT on Persistence chain by Q2
- Host other supported Tendermint-based stkASSETs on Persistence chain by Q3
- Make XPRT one of the most liquid assets within the IBCGang through further use-cases and integrations (e.g. integration with Juno, Umee, Injective, etc.)
- Significantly improve chain metrics including on-chain TVL, IBC transactions, etc.
pSTAKE Finance
- Make stkASSETs the core assets of the PoS economy
- Launch stkASSETs for ETH 2.0 and Solana (stkETH and stkSOL) by Q2
- Asset issuance of Tendermint-based assets (stkATOM, stkXPRT etc) on the IBC-enabled Persistence Core-1 chain by Q2
- Make stkXPRT the base-pair against all major stkASSETs
- Add support for more PoS assets including LUNA, BNB, etc. by Q3
- Bootstrap use-cases of stkASSETS (e.g. DEXs, borrowing/lending)
- Building liquidity for stkASSETs on the DEXs and other DeFi dApps
AUDIT.one
- Reach $2B in assets under delegation by Q4 (currently $600M including whitelabelled clients)
- Become a top-10 validator for major chains in the Cosmos ecosystem
- Become a top-20 validator for the top-10 PoS layer-1 chains
- Become a node operator for all major (liquid) staking pools
- Build a one-stop comprehensive staking/liquid staking dashboard
Ecosystem
Ecosystem applications will be encouraged to build use-cases around stkASSETs. Some of the potential applications we envision to be built in the Persistence ecosystem:
- DEXs supporting yield-bearing stkASSETs.
- Auto-repaying loans against stkASSETs, where staking rewards are used to repay the borrow interest rates.
- stkASSET indexes, enabling users to gain exposure to staking rewards of multiple PoS assets directly via the various stkASSET index products. Other use-cases can extend from this, e.g. borrowing against these indexes as collateral.
- Yield optimisation and insurance products centering around the stkASSETs.
Miscellaneous
- Conduct hackathons to discover new use-cases around stkASSETs
- Introduce grant programs to enable developers to build these use-cases
- This can be done through either a modular, smart contract-based, or App-chain approach
- Bootstrap traction on new applications through a structured incentivisation program
Organisational Growth
Another focus for Persistence this year is expanding the team’s capabilities, instituting replicable processes as we scale, and building a culture driven by curiosity in order to attract talent operating at a global scale.
Some of the activities we will be undertaking:
- Conduct hackathons to source talent
- Organise ideation meetups and workshops
- Expand in-house research capabilities
- Encourage thought-leadership in the field of staking and liquid staking
- Establish scalable processes using best-in-class tools
- Creation of a strong culture of openness, meritocracy
- Greater engagement with supporters and investors like Sequoia, 3AC, etc.
- Marketing and analytics partnerships like Messari, Nansen, etc.
Closing Note — The Vision
The broader vision of Persistence is to become the liquid staking hub of the PoS space, making liquid staked stkASSETs the default assets of the staking economy. Building pSTAKE Finance is the first step towards realizing this vision.
Use-cases for stkASSETs will be driven through a range of applications and integrations bridging the PoS and DeFi verticals. With ecosystem products like pSTAKE aiming to be amongst the biggest dApps in the respective domains, XPRT aims to be one of the top-100 assets (currently ~190th) by market capitalization within the industry.
As we strive to become leaders of the PoS industry, we will continue to stay true to the ideals of Persistence and continuously fight to make the ecosystem bigger, delivering more value for XPRT (and stkXPRT) holders and stakers.
Yours faithfully,
Tushar Aggarwal
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.
The Persistence chain 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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