Interview with Gains Associates: Persistence.
Heres an breakdown of the interview of Persistence CEO, Tushar Aggarwal by Gains Associate host, Alexandre Raffinose.
Alexandre started by acknowledging Persistence as one of the few projects doing great in the current market and put it to the belief that the Persistence team is a very active one providing very cool next-gen products that can withstand whatever the market has to offer. He then went on to ask Tushar what Persistence is really all about. Tushal started by saying that the Persistence project actually started in the bear market. To put this to perspective, he clearly said that so many projects started in the bull market and so when the storm came, they were severely hit because they didn’t have strong foundations built for that. This wasn’t to be for Persistence. Launched during the bear, they were building a project that was already hardwired to survive. This was done by focusing on the fundamentals and building a strong foundation. He also went on to state that the Persistence team was built to always push for the narrative. In his own terms, he said, "My general philosophy is that when others are going on defense or retreating, that you go on offense. Now that is some philosophy. He went on to state that Persistence is a tendermint-base chain with a variety of great products starting with Comdex. Comdex is actually a non-crypto user application. A trade tech platform that is designed to help overcome the many challenges associated with trade in the real world. Taking care of speed of transactions, transparency and trust via many measures, Comdex is actually handling the vital issues associated with commodity trading thus powering decentralized commodity trading. The project has actually done well by its standards which Tushar claiming that it has done over 100 million dollars in transaction volume since inception. By all standards, I beg to reckon that figure is highly insane. With this level of success, Tushar went on to state that there would be a shift in focus to the crypto user applications starting with pSTAKE.
On hearing about pSTAKE, Alex asked Tushar to throw more light on the pSTAKE platform and what it aims to achieve. He started by saying that pSTAKE is a liquid taking application. To buttress this point, he went on to differentiate DeFi staking from PoS taking. Stating that DeFi staking allows you to stake your coins so that you can take part in governance or other activities within the chain . The Proof of Stake is different . Here you earn rewards for helping to validate the next block but this is in a different manner when compared to the Proof of Work. In the Proof of Work, the first to solve the mathematical puzzle will be the user to add the next block to the growing chain. In the Proof of Stake however, there is no clamor for speed. The user with the highest stake would stand a greater chance of being the next to validate and earn rewards. You get your coins and you stake them, earning rewards in the process. The only problem is that these assets are locked during the staking period and so you can only just earn the staking rewards. You can’t bring the coins out to use for other purposes without unstaking them. That’s where pSTAKE comes in. With pSTAKE, the users get representatives of their staked assets. These representatives can then be taken to the different system and used for other purposes. These include being able to use them to supply liquidity on DEXes, collateral, borrowing and lending. This allows the end user to use a single asset to generate more returns than they ordinarily would have if they were just staking. Tushar went on to state that many of the current liquid staking programs are on Ethereum 2 because of its sheer market size. pSTAKE finance would be marketing with ATOMs and other Tendermint-base based coins as it is the second-largest addressable market after Ethereum 2.
Alexandre asked Tushar to throw more light on the staking rewards and Tushar give a perfect reply with this illustration. Let’s say you stake your ATOM in the pSTAKE application. You earn about 10% rewards for staking. The pSTAKE application then issues you pATOMs, a representative of the ATOM you just staked on pSTAKE. The pATOM is an ERC-20 token that you can then take to the DeFi ecoystem to use for other purposes like supplying liquidity for the pATOM-USDC pool on UNISWAP. That way you can earn additional rewards in the DeFi ecosystem. He said that users can also supply liquidity to a DEX, earn transaction fees and supply liquidity mining on other coins this incentivizing more people to stake on the pSTAKE application. On how this benefits the underlying network, he said that more and more coins of the underlying network get in thus increasing the staking ratio of the underlying network and securing it. The end user is also winning because he can earn multiple rewards. Also the Persistence team is winning as more traction comes to the pSTAKE product.
When asked if it was necessary to use XPRT to run the application, Tushar said no. He then went on to state the use case of the XPRT token calling it a-work token meaning that stakers of XPRT actually receive some of the fees generated from the app. This small fees that the users of the app pay end up in the hands of XPRT stakers. This is great. This PoS coin currently generates 25% staking rewards at the moment. These rewards would increase when the pSTAKE is live as the users will be able to earn rewards in any coin that is being used on the pSTAKE platform. He went on to state that the aim was to ensure incentives for all the various stakeholders in the Persistence ecosystem. When asked about the fees that will be charged users on the platform Tushar went on to make example of the fees required to move wBTC from BTC to Ethereun which is between 0.3 to 0.5%.
He said that is the range for the fees on the pSTAKE platform. He also talked about the redemption pool that will be be live on V2 that would have fees too. Tushar also went on to talk about the Alpha launch for testing pSTAKE which would start on the 15th of June and last for 10 days. This would go through audit and then the launch of the actual product . When asked about where they plan to be in 5 years and also the team, he said the aim is still to grow and develop. To be better and better and Persistence has a team that is capable of going to those great heights.
PERSISTENCE
Website: https://www.persistence.one/
Telegram: https://t.me/PersistenceOneChat
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PersistenceOne
Official Blog: https://medium.com/persistence-blog
