Building Persistence — Cryptocito Interviews Persistence CEO, Tushar Aggarwal
Following a series of interviews recently, Persistence CEO, Tushar Aggarwal was with Cryptocito this time around and here are a few details from the meeting.
Cryptocito started by introducing Tushar as the CEO and co-founder of Persistence; another project that’s part of the Cosmos ecosystem. He also stated that Persistence was one of the first to enter the IBC that helps connect blockchains; listed on Osmosis and definitely gaining loss of traction recently. He laid more emphasis, though, on the liquid staking model; the core principle of the Persistence project, pSTAKE.
Tushar started by stating how great it was to be on the show and the progress made with the launch on Osmosis and also pSTAKE which is the liquid staking app. When asked about the origin of Persistence, Tushar stated that he started out officially at LuneX Ventures, based in Singapore. As for Persistence, he stated that he had been on the media side of things with the podcast but wished to be on the operations side of things. He talked about his drive to birth the project out of India despite having extensive travel experience across China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. He also talked about how they were able to assemble the team in India. They, then, set their sights on their first use case which was Commodity trading use case with Comdex application. He also stated that they tried building through different platforms with Ethereum coming to mind first and ultimately were directed to the proof of stake ecosystem with Cosmos and Tezos coming first to mind. They decided to build on Cosmos because of its application-specific chain thought process and philosophy. They started out with Audit.One and even did a stakedrop campaign which gave them the ideation of liquid staking. They tried to solve problems as they evolved in the process.
After acknowledging how good Persistence have been with the Comdex application and some others Cryptocito went on to talk about the bittersweet relationship between India and crypto. Ban, Accept, Support and then Ban again. With reference to this, he asked how Tushar viewed the situation and the effect it has had on the business.
Tushar then reiterated that his thought process had always been to build for the world but to start building from home; India. He made no mistake in stating that he believed that the best act in the crypto space were in Silicon valley and in China with little pockets spread across Europe and Asia but that India was evolving, too in the cryptospace. He talked about the regulatory structure of Singapore that is supportive and also the reason why most basic entities are based in Singapore but the core part of the team in India. He went on to state that despite the fact that they were built from India, they weren’t just targeting the Indian market with most users of their next-gen financial products, global with marketing agencies in the US, China and Korea as well as community managers in Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam and Russia amongst others thus showing that they are focused on building a global brand with as much recognition.
Tushar went on to state that the main aim was the hyper financialization of the world with a lot of next-gen financial products coming across non-crypto (Comdex) and Crypto (pSTAKE, Audit.One, AssetMantle) areas.
Cryptocito then went on to ask about how the team is operating and he has talked to Ahbitej who said that they had different teams and they were all working under different products. He then asked Tushar to give an overview of the different products being worked on and also how they operate. Tushar went on to elaborate that there are two aspects; the team aspect and the product aspect. From a team perspective, the structure is research, design, marketing, growth, community management, compliance and finance operations. As for the products, each one of them had product verticals led by one product manager or CTO. In terms of the products, the first is Persistence itself, which is the infrastructure layer (the tendermint-based chain, the Persistence SDK, the wallet, the block explorer). He went on to say the second product was Comdex, which was a third-party application that uses the Persistence architecture. There was strong cooperation with the Comdex team to help out. The third was Audit.one which was basically folks, who helped to manage software. The 4th, he said, was liquid staking with pSTAKE.
Cryptocito then went on to talk about the most important part of the meeting; the decision to choose Cosmos and how they find it exciting. Tushar said that Cosmos was one of the first in-production platforms out there at the time. He also went on to state that Cosmos had the total absence of maximalism as seen in the Ethereum and Bitcoin set up. Also the fact that it was an application-specific chain that could be tailored to meet the needs of dApps. Making reference to some applications requiring more security than throughput and vice versa.
They then drifted to the pSTAKE and liquid staking. Cryptocito, then went on to ask what liquid staking meant and why it is important on the broad scale of things for end users.
Tushar started by talking about staking in and of itself and tried to differentiate it from the type where you’re just staking a governance coin and it doesn’t really mean anything.
He went on to define it from the point of rewards and how it is linked to mining in the proof of work. He said it was in the same sphere with staking, giving you the ability to add the next block (data) to the growing chain on the blockchain, whilst receiving rewards for it. He said that the reason for the decision to do liquid staking arose from the stakedrop campaign last year where stakers of certain chains like Cosmos hub, Terra, Kava and Matic would receive XPRT. Within three (3) months, there were over a billion dollars of staked assets participating in the campaigns and so there was a huge demand from users to generate additional use from already staked assets. This brought the idea of liquid staking. He went on to lay more emphasis on liquid staking with the ATOM example. When you stake ATOM, you get about 9 to 10% APY but with liquid staking, you can stake your ATOMs and receive an equal amount of a representative ERC-20 coin that will give you ownership of this underlying staked coin, ATOM. This representative token, pATOM, would then be used to supply liquidity to DEXes to earn more fees or use them as collateral to earn more fees. That’s liquid staking; more use for your gems.
It was a great interview as they talked also about the Gravity DEX and also the listing of XPRT on Osmosis.
You can look out for the video of the interview here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GoQh9fzKMU
https://osmosis.zone
