How Persistence Is Blazing Trail in DeFi

Comdex is the flagship product of the Persistence ecosystem – a commodities and trading financing platform.

Even as recently as a year ago, decentralized finance was often referred to as the “new frontier” of crypto, likened to the “wild west” days of the ICO.

But a lot has changed. Along with retail investors, institutions are now rushing to embrace cryptocurrencies, even despite the recent Musk-induced volatility. Increasing familiarity with cryptocurrency markets is also leading to a rising interest in DeFi from a broad demographic of traders and investors. Former US acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks saw the sea change coming early, predicting in January that “self-driving banks” powered by smart contracts are closer than we may think.

Persistence is one project on the bleeding edge of the transformation set to take over traditional finance. It’s developed on the interoperable Cosmos platform and designed to provide an umbrella to a suite of DeFi platforms catering to the needs of conventional institutions, crypto-native players, and retail traders alike. And it’s set to undergo a series of launches this year which will cement its place as a key player in the global DeFi ecosystem.

Paving the Way with Commodities Trading and Staking-as-a-Service

Comdex is the flagship product of the Persistence ecosystem – a commodities and trading financing platform. Commodity trading is the backbone of the global economy, but it’s too often dependent on slow, manual, and paper-based processes.

Leveraging the apparent benefits of blockchain in supply chains and trade finance, Comdex uses NFTs to tokenize invoices so they can be handled on-chain. It also includes features such as in-built KYC, near-instant settlements, and e-document handling. The result is a DeFi platform that bridges the gap to real-world, physical assets.

Recently, Comdex surpassed $100 million in transaction volume, and in light of the growing appetite for DeFi protocols, it aims to hit $500 million this year. It now serves 18 trade organizations, smoothing the path for a large audience of users to find their way into decentralized finance.

Audit.One is the other established service under the Persistence banner. It’s a staking-as-a-service solution provider that’s grown to become the largest validator in South Asia with $300 million worth of assets under delegation. Audit.One validates on ten proof-of-stake networks including Cosmos, Terra, Near, Polygon, Celo and its own Persistence network. It plans to support Tezos, Polkadot, and Ethereum soon.

Liquid Staking with pStake

The next significant milestone on the Persistence roadmap also plans to tap into the growing global market for staking, with the launch of pStake. Staking cryptocurrencies is proving to be a popular way of earning passive income for many holders, with the total market cap of all proof-of-stake assets now above $600 billion.

However, a key challenge is that it locks up liquidity, so pStake aims to overcome this challenge with its liquid staking platform. A user can deposit their assets to be staked in pStake, where they earn the same passive income as if they were staked directly. However, the user receives “stkToken” from pStake, which represents their staked assets. They can use the stkTokens in other DeFi apps, offering an opportunity to increase yields even further.

pStake will launch in June focusing first on leading PoS networks, including Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum 2.0, Solana and Terra. Users who stake the project’s native XPRT token will be eligible to receive a share of the fees generated by the platform as a form of reward. The launch of pStake marks an important step in connecting the sizable proof-of-stake economy to DeFi.

More on the Roadmap

Persistence is also developing two additional products in its portfolio. Later in Q2, the project will launch an MVP for its NFT marketplace application, called Asset Mantle. Unlike many NFT platforms, which simply allow someone to list their NFTs for auction, Asset Mantle will empower anyone to launch their own NFT marketplace.

The project styles itself as the “Shopify of NFT marketplaces,” and Persistence has already onboarded a well-established art auction house to develop its own marketplace on the Asset Mantle platform.

A further branch of Persistence still in development is the pLend platform. It will allow users to stake either their crypto assets or real-world assets. It will also be the first pending protocol to focus on using Liquid Staking Representatives as collateral against which to issue debt.

A Valuable and Growing Network

Alongside the development work, Persistence has also been working hard to develop its network among the global blockchain community. The project has onboarded some of the biggest validators in the ecosystem to help secure its network, including Tavis Digital (an offshoot of Swiss investment firm Tavis Capital,) Band Protocol, Huobi Pool, and Cosmostation.

Together, the top 20 validators out of 72 on the Persistence network secure over $15 billion worth of assets. Staking of the XPRT token is currently at around 90%, with over 4500 wallets.

Persistence has also onboarded a stellar advisory team that includes senior figures from companies such as The Spartan Group, Polygon (formerly Matic Network), Aave, Tendermint, and Iris Network.

Committed to the growth of the interoperable DeFi ecosystem, Persistence also recently supported the launch of the Gravity DEX testnet, which drew in over 21,000 participants.

Plenty of projects lay claim to being the next big thing in DeFi, but Persistence has something that many others don’t – an established user base of professional commodities traders, thanks to its early efforts with Comdex. Therefore, it’s well-positioned to help onboard users to other areas of DeFi as they grow accustomed to the space, heralding a new era of adoption.