Tushar Aggarwal on Persistence's liquid staking platform

0:21up to a lot since we last spoke and some pretty exciting developments in not just the commodity space but staking sticking as a service defy and nfts your team is all over i would love for you to kick it off with an update and an overview and the focus on persistence and then we can dive into the details yeah absolutely and you know for some of the listeners who've been

0:44here since you know 2018 and 2019 i had done an episode with ashton when i was at lunex which was which is a crypto fund baby fund of golden gate ventures a traditional venture capital fund and then since you know i transitioned into founding my own project and being on the operator side as opposed to being a capital allocator and at persistence you know we're doing

1:12a bunch of things and we've had an interesting journey so if i kind of go maybe chronologically and break it down by products as ashton mentioned so first came com dex which is a decentralized commodity trading platform more geared more geared towards institutional traders and in the process of building complex we realized that there were a lot of

1:37infrastructural things that were missing which is how persistence came about where you know persistence is acting more as the infrastructure layer to build multiple things within the within the d5 space so you know persistence came out of stealth on the 1st of jan 2020 and as some of the audience may remember that you know in march

2:052020 essentially we had a huge crash and you know basically for about six months we found it extremely difficult to fundraise and so during that time we started audit dot one which is our staking as a service solution which allowed us to create cash flows to be able to cover our expenses and pay salaries and so that was you know how audit was born and you know

2:30now it has grown to being one of the largest speaking as a service solution providers in southeast asia and south asia with more than 300 million assets under delegation you know post that you know during after the launch of the compound token in june 2020 we had kind of the you know d5 summer 1.0 and you know during that time you know essentially we went out

2:58aggressively and raised capital so that you know we didn't have to rely on just our staking income you know and you could expand aggressively both in terms of team in terms of marketing and things like that so that was in q3 2020 in q4 2020 we did a state drop campaign where stakers of certain coins such as luna atom kava matic would receive a very

3:21targeted air drop off the persistence coin and so within a three month period we had more than a billion dollars worth of staked coins that were participating in this take drop campaign so that kind of showed us the humongous amount of demand that there is in terms of generating additional yields from already steak assets and that's how pea steak came about

3:41which is a liquid staking product where we're allowing holders of staked coins to generate additional yields from their currently staked coins so that's been sort of you know a very circuit was journey of having created multiple products we're a team of 32 people now across the board on the you know tech and business side across

4:06You know back-end developers front-end developers blockchain developers devops folks designers researchers and then on the business side in terms of community bd growth marketing compliance operations finance so i have a full-fledged team we want to keep spinning out multiple products on the business side we all focus it's more horizontal in nature

4:31in the sense that most people focus on multiple products in parallel whereas on the technical side it's more vertical where each product has like a product owner and product manager and they take ownership for that product so that's how we're kind of high level structured and you know from our perspective we'll aggressively keep producing you know more and more

4:51products and keep trying to you know penetrate deeper into the crypto world to grow our communities keep growing our you know technical and business prowess wonderful to char that's a great intro and it's quite interesting to see the variety of different products and how they came about that your team is working on having that sticking as a service moving into

5:18pea steak which looks like it's revolutionary right now you know besides d5 people are learning to stake their bitcoin ethereum other major digital assets in centralized or decentralized platforms and especially with all these other proof-of-stake blockchains coming out more and more percentage of these coins are being locked in and from what

5:38i understand there is a competitive advantage with peace take because normally when those coins are locked in they aren't always usable for other purposes that you know it's either you lock it in and get the reward or you don't lock it and you can use them but you don't get that reward and you're finding a way around that looking at the frictions

5:58in staking and probably part of the reason why some people aren't staking is because their coins are locked up can you talk about that unique part of pee steak where you saw the frictions in staking and how you're looking at getting more people to do staking through p stakes platform yeah so i mean i think if we talk about peace take in particular i think i'm

6:19taking a step back as well so i wasn't early enough in the industry to do bitcoin mining at scale or to do ethereum mining at scale which are you know the two big proof of work blockchains so peacetake is focused more on the proof of stake block chains exclusively i was early however enough in the industry to be extremely early to be a validator and so multiple team

6:46members from persistence have been involved on the proof of stake side the first few delegated proof of stake chains in production were the car were cosmos and deserts and so you know over the last three years or so since we've had delegated proof of stake chains in production we've been involved in the launch of at least five networks like i've already

7:10mentioned we have good experience in terms of running validator nodes ourselves and being a back validator ourselves and you know i talked about the state drop campaign which kind of was a motivating factor for us to start doing peace take but like you rightly mentioned a lot of folks have essentially a trade-off between staking and liquidity so

7:37either you stake and earns taking rewards or you know obviously you know if you have staked a lot of proof of stake blockchains have a 21 day or a 28 day unbonding period where even if you unstake you don't get your coins back immediately you have to wait for a 21 day period which causes illiquidity and causes a lot of people to not stake which is the problem that we're trying

8:03to address that you know what we want people to do is that we want people to stake and earns taking rewards but still have the flexibility to be liquid and if they want to get out of their position in case the markets are falling and someone wants to sell off then the platform enables the holders of a staked coin to sell that essentially representative coin to someone else

8:31and whoever you sell this representative coin to gets access to the underlying staked coin as well so essentially you're transferring ownership of a staked coin without unstaking it very interesting and you did mention their cosmos and tazos on the proof of stake blockchains that you're we're working on is that are those the primary assets

8:57or are there a variety of proof-of-stake assets that you have and that you're also looking to include as you grow the platform yeah so you know historically we've had the strongest community within the cosmos ecosystem cosmos itself has multiple proof of stake points including you know cosmos atom terra luna injective protocol crypto.com cro coin

9:24is a tenderman base point kava iris so these are all akash networks these are all coins that you know are proof of stake coins that will be part of the peace take platform outside of the cosmos ecosystem if we look at big ecosystems you know you have the polkadot ecosystem and you have solana obviously the largest ecosystem today is eth2

9:49with the transition of ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake so that is of course the largest addressable market as far as you know liquid staking is concerned definitely that's great to know and you mentioned earlier with these delegated proof of stake platforms you're actually delegating the assets to validators like yourselves and i believe you

10:11have a lot of partners that you're working with as well to make it easier for people to stake and to help on their behalf can you elaborate that on that a little bit in terms of when users go and start staking they're actually sharing their rewards with the validator and the validator is actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting for them or how

10:28exactly does that work with the validators yeah absolutely so i mean the equivalent of validators in the proof of work ecosystem are the miners so in proof of stake instead of calling them miners we just call them validators but essentially validators do exactly what miners do which is validate transactions and hence the name validators so and you know this is the biggest

10:54difference that people don't get in terms of staking within d5 and staking pos coins so sticking within d5 is just taking a governance token so that you have a say in what the platform does or certain decision making parameters that protocol wants to take or the community wants to take whereas in proof of stake when you're staking a coin as the name goes proof of stake when you

11:20stick a coin you're actually doing what the miners do and that's where the risk comes from as well that if the validator that you have delegated your asset to becomes malicious or does not have good infrastructure and has certain downtime then the stake that you have put can actually get slashed as well or that stick can get reduced so i think these are risks that a lot of

11:46folks don't understand but i think with the transition from eath to eat 2.0 i think these risks and just taking in general is taking from a perspective of taking part in consensus of the chain is going to become more clear you know to the users and to the community members which is not very widely understood at the moment you know like i said proof of stake in production has been

12:13only active for less than three years or at least delegated proof of stake or proof of stake as we know it and you know essentially every new chain that is being launched is now some form of a delegated proof of stake chain so whether that is you know solana or near avalanche you know obviously cosmos tezos polkadot and they have followed one form or one

12:38variation or the other of how both cosmos and tesos went to market yeah that's a great explanation thank you for elaborating on that and part of the in the p-stick platform you mentioned that you're actually because the assets are locked in and then you're creating a sort of wrapped token through persistence where you're able to trade it and

13:02move that to somebody else and then they have ownership of the underlying stake tokens does that involve the persistence in the xprt token and if so can you elaborate on that and how the persistence token works within the platform and if it has any other use cases outside of the peace stake as well yeah so you know the xprt token essentially

13:24is a staking token as well at the pos level so persistence itself is a tenement based chain our journey you know has been very similar to that of terra and some of the audience members may be familiar with the terra ecosystem so terra is a tenement based chain they have chai as their non-crypto user-facing application which is focused on e-commerce payments

13:44and then they have anchor protocol mirror protocol which are you know essentially their you know crypto native user facing applications so our journey has been similar where we have persistence as a tendent based a chain we have comdex as a non-crypto user facing application because comdex is focused on institutional commodity traders and then we have peace take and you know a couple

14:06of other applications which are more focused towards crypto native folks so as far as xprt is concerned xprt is the staking token of the consensus token that binds together the entire persistence ecosystem and fees from all of these different applications whether that is complex or b stake is shared with the xprt stakers so xprt has inflation built in and so

14:30there are staking rewards that are given to the xprt stakers so it's starting off with 35 for the first two years and then halves every two years so you know 2023 onwards it's going to be 17 and a half percent 2025 onwards is gonna be eight point two five percent and so on and so to account for that decrease in staking rewards what we want to do is create substantial

14:55transaction fees increase so that the effective api of staking xtrt remains the same for the holders and stakers of xprt well that's great to know and it's nice to see that you can also use it as a staking asset itself as well and we did talk about those assets that you're working on in the proof of stake ecosystem can you talk about just the major

15:20milestones and the road map for pea stake for the rest of 2021 in the coming months yeah absolutely and i'm glad you only asked for 2021 because you know a lot of people ask us like what your plans of the next five years and you know there's just so much uncertainty in crypto that's so difficult to answer that question so we typically try to internally

15:40plan for the next kind of three to six months as well so we're recording this on the 22nd of june we recently last seven days ago on the 15th of june launched what we call a pre-alpha bug bounty launch for p-stick and so essentially what we want users to do is kind of play around with the product and find all the bugs both from a code perspective as well as from a ui

16:04perspective what we're going to do is incorporate all of those changes and do like a staking competition of sorts from beginning of july onwards and then between 10th to 15th july is when we're looking to launch you know peace takers like a beta product where actual financial assets will be at risk but what we want to do is we want to do

16:26the launch in a capped manner so the launch starts with you know maybe a cap of like say 10 000 atoms or so by the way we're going to mark it with atoms as the first currency we're going to be expanding the coverage over a period of time so mid july is when we launch it with atoms over you know over basically you know q3 what we want to do is expand the coverage of the assets that

16:50we cover so you know basically try to go after multiple assets and then over a period of time what we'll also be trying to do is add features so we're launching with very basic features but over a period of time we'll be adding the feature feature set in parallel we're getting security audits done so that you know users feel secure in terms

17:10of you know supplying huge amounts of liquidity you know to the product and we can get more institutional and bigger holders of atoms and other pos points to be using the p stake platform as well so you know definitely trying to put a huge amount of focus on cyber security and so essentially yeah i mean i don't know if that makes sense but you

17:34know essentially that's kind of what our roadmap looks like you know launch the product by mid-july or so focus on expanding the coverage of the assets focus on adding features and yeah i mean i think those are you know and also getting these assets that we're issuing or the representative coins that we're showing or the wrapped coins as you

17:57mentioned making sure that those assets get accepted into other d5 products as collateral to facilitate borrowing lending or for those assets to be supplied as liquidity on decentralized exchanges and things like that so i think those are the you know sort of three big things that we'll be shooting for in 2021 yeah that sounds like great road map to chart and to get the

18:23community involved at an early stage i think it's very important to bring out those bug bounties and help people get ready for the beta and the launch in mid-july which i am excited to try out when that launch does happen for the viewers that are looking to get involved with this these bounties right away and to get ready to hear more news on exactly

18:43when the platform's going live what is the best way for them to learn more about persistence and get into the community yeah so you know the usual platforms twitter telegram so the persistent twitter we have a separate twitter for free stake as well so persistence twitter is handle is at the rate persistence one peace take twitter handle is addressed p state finance

19:06And then obviously you know we have the persistence website itself or the and the peacetake website so peacetake.finance this is the peacetake website if you go to alpha.pstake.finance that's where you know the boundary product is out there so depending on when this episode goes live you know users can maybe test out the alpha or test out the

19:26actual product once it's launched sounds great to char i will leave all those links in the description box below as well all the best with the upcoming launch of the pstake platform and persistence as a whole and let's follow up in the near future awesome thank you action for having me on the show you