Mass adoption of cryptocurrency is very important and Satoshi Club wants it to happen as soon as possible. And today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Persistence. The AMA took place on October 15 and our guests were Tushar Aggarwal, CEO, Persistence, Abhitej Singh, Strategy & Community Lead and Mikhil Pandey.
The total reward pool was 500$ and has been splitted in 3 parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.
Part 1 — introduction and questions from the Telegram&Bitcointalk community
Mary | Satoshi Club: Hello, Satoshi Club! We are happy to announce our AMA session with Persistence:grinning: @tusharaggarwal @abhitejsingh and @pandeymikhil welcome to Satoshi Club:grinning:
D. | Satoshi Club: hello all
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Hi all, Great to be here
D. | Satoshi Club: @tusharaggarwal @abhitejsingh @pandeymikhil hello guys! good to have you
Mikhil Pandey | Persistence: Hi everyone, Excited to be here
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: Hello everyone, It’s great to be here and I am sure it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Mary | Satoshi Club: You are welcome :grinning: how was your day?)
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: It’s been a little hectic – we just made a major announcement regarding a Stakedrop campaign – which is one of the boggest community initiatives we have launched
D. | Satoshi Club: can you share with us?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Absolutely
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: #StakeDrop #Community PoS Token Holders, Prepare Yourselves for Persistence StakeDrop! 1,000,000 XPRT Tokens will be Distributed!
We’ve been meticulously planning an innovative initiative to provide the crypto community with access and exposure to XPRT (Persistence’s native token). It’s called StakeDrop, and it’s emerging on the horizon.
StakeDrop is a token distribution mechanism that allows token holders of prominent PoS networks to receive an allocation of XPRT tokens simply by staking on their favourite networks. Networks include: Cosmos Network, Terra, Kava Labs, IRISnet, Polkadot, Matic Network and Tezos.
1% of the total supply of XPRT tokens (1,000,000 XPRT) is allocated for StakeDrop rewards. Reward amounts for specific participants depend on a variety of factors, including which network/s they are staking on, whether they are delegating to an AUDIT.one validator (higher rewards) or a different validator, and the length of their participation in each campaign.
🤝 Airdrops are so 2017. StakeDrop has been designed to be much more than a conventional airdrop; it’s an experience. StakeDrop benefits all parties involved, whilst providing an engaging experience for StakeDrop participants.
The first of seven StakeDrop campaigns will be on Cosmos Network, and will begin on October 26th, 2020. Each of the following StakeDrop campaigns will then commence 10 days after the previous one begins. We will keep the community updated on the details of each campaign as we move forward.
Are you ready for StakeDrop? We certainly are :sunglasses:
Read the full details here: https://buff.ly/375424p
🗣 Spread the word: https://twitter.com/PersistenceOne/status/1316720422591881216
Mary | Satoshi Club: Oh, i saw it:joy: it’s really big:+1:
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Hah yes! We already see a lot of interest in. Great way to Stakers and Delegators to get Persistence $XPRT token
D. | Satoshi Club: ready for stakedrop? )
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, sure:joy: everything with ‘drop’ is mine:joy:
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: We’ll be ‘drop’ping more good news as we go along 😉
Mary | Satoshi Club: Guys, could you, please, introduce yourself? Also how did you start with Persistence?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Yess! My first crypto experience was when I was based in Singapore – towards the end of 2016, I got on Coinbase and started buying cryptos after getting my capital out of some traditional investments. Was looking to do angel investments into startups but instead came across crypto and the rest is as they say, history. I started my career in the Blockchain/Crypto industry hosting the Decrypt Asia podcast (https://decrypt.asia/) and writing extensively about Blockchain/Crypto on Tech in Asia.
Then I joined as the first employee at Singapore based LuneX Ventures (Crypto arm of a Traditional VC Golden Gate Ventures – https://goldengate.vc/). Seeing an opportunity to contribute more to the ecosystem by being a founder versus an investor and bringing institutional capital into the industry, I started Persistence in Q2 2019 and we came out of stealth in January 2020.
One of my blogposts on Terra from back in the day – https://www.techinasia.com/terra-drive-mass-adoption
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, mass adoption is our headache and engine to move forward) We need it more and more)
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: It is also crucial as the industry moves from a ‘speculative’ phase to a ‘value creeation’ phase
Mary | Satoshi Club: That’s true) i think we are close to the ‘value of creation’
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: It takes time – but yes, definitely moving in that direction. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve at Persistence as well
D. | Satoshi Club: @pandeymikhil @abhitejsingh what about you guys, can you tell Satoshi club about yourself? just a bit 😁
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: Hello everyone,
I am Abhitej Singh, I lead the Marketing Strategy and Community at Persistence. I was introduced to Crypto industry while travelling across the US in 2017 and got into it completely in late 2018.
Before joining Persistence, I was helping a couple of early stage startups (now backed by Ola and Flipkart – unicorns in India). I was also actively involved building communities for Google, facebook and co-founded national hackathon in India called Code2Create.
I met Tushar and Deepanshu in 2019 at Blockchain Conference and really liked the vision they had and joined them back in November 2019. Here we are building @PersistenceOne!
Mary | Satoshi Club: I see that blockchain conferences are often behind the beginning of great collaborations)
Mikhil Pandey | Persistence: I was in college and was trading cryptocurrencies. Soon after I graduated I started looking at the industry from a different perspective. I knew Abhitej through a common friend and he introduced us and after that I just fell in love with Persistence’s vision
Q1 from bitcointalk user tolgaozek @tolgaozek on Telegram
About 3.7 M investment by different VCs, how percentage did they get in your portfolio? How many advisors will they assign for you?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: We’ll be releasing the tokeneconomics in the coming days. Pls join this to stay tuned https://t.me/PersistenceOne . Advisors are on this page – https://persistence.one/teamAlong with the team 🙂 We have advisors who bring different aspects to the table – ranging from geographical support (e.g. in China) to overall strategy, community and token management, marketing etc
D. | Satoshi Club: approximately when? on this week, on the next one? )
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: No timeline confirmed on this one
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, you didn’t have public token sale?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Nope not yet. Currently, the big initiative for the community to participate is the Stakedrop campaign
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, that is a chance)))
Mikhil Pandey | Persistence: 1% of our total genesis supply up for grabs through StakeDrop
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, how did you choose Cosmos, Polkadot etc for your stakedrop?) Was it random?)
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: We’ve been early betters on the PoS/dPoS ecosystem as well as believers in Interoperability. We are building on Tendermint as well and hence part of the Cosmos ecosystem. As a result, it was a natural choice for us to pick Cosmos Polkadot. Along with other relevant and strategic Blockchain projects also in the Cosmos Polkadot ecosystem
Mary | Satoshi Club: But you will have your own blockchain later, am i right?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Correct. Tendermint follows the app-chain model. So other Tendermint based projects such as Kava, Band, Terra all have their Tendermint based chains. It will be the same for us
Mary | Satoshi Club: Great, when do you plan it to go live?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Currently, Comdex (the first application in the Persistence ecosystem) is running on Testnet. Comdex is going to hit mainnet in November. Comdex is a physical commodity trading and trade financing platform that is already in production. It has now processed 41M worth of commodity trades and 41M worth of commodities have been tokenised using NFTs. Happy to go into more detail as to how that works
Abhitej Singh | Persistence:
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: As highlighted, Comdex plays this role. Physical Commodities are represented on chain using NFTs. Similar to how every Cryptokitty is unique. Every Commodity is unique. Once commodities are represented on chain using NFTs, they can be traded against Stablecoins
Mary | Satoshi Club: You will have DEX and debt marketplace from the very beginning there?)
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: As for debt marketplace. Once a trade is complete, it usually takes place on credit terms which means that buyer doesnt pay seller immediately. But after 30-90 days. Sometimes the seller wants immediately liqudiity, So the seller can place the invoice generated from the trade as collateral to secure a loan. As a result, we enable putting ‘real world’ assets as collateral to enable borrowing / lending. Unlike the Crypto industry today, where you can only use Cryptoassets as collateral. This is the natural progression of borrowing lending using Crypto as the rails
Q2 from bitcointalk user rolex745 @konditer_rolex on Telegram
Good afternoon. I really love NFT. I have collections with the Pepe the frog, there are nft created by cryptocurrency with the image of monkeys. For me, like for many people, nft is funny pictures. Tell us how your NFTs that you plan to use to tokenize real assets differ from pictures with a funny frog?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Haha good question!! Like I mentioned..like how Pepe the Frog is unique, Every ‘real world’ asset is unique. Pepe the Frog has certain unique characteristics similar to every commodity or business invoice having unique characteristics. Like how you would be able to trade frogs or monkeys or digital art..similarly once something is represented on chain, it can be traded. We’ve been working with NFTs for a long time in this context. The Interchain Foundation (foundation governing Cosmos) gave us a grant recently to create ‘interchain’ standards for NFTs
This is similar to how ERC721 has become the NFT standard within Ethereum ecosystem. We lead the Global Working group to define these standards. For more details (especially for developers) – http://internft.org/
interNFT working group, inter stands for interoperable
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, in simple words, it will be a picture, for example, of my invoice on blockchain, yes?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Exactly
Q3 from Telegram Username @Dunc2k
If you use real world assets as collateral, are they at any risk of loss? How does that work?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Yes, in the beginning, we work with multiple third parties to check the authenticity of the ‘real world’ assets. Whether those real world assets exist. Once that verification is done, then they are brought on chain
Mary | Satoshi Club: Even with authenticity, don’t you have to face with government regulations?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Proper underwriting (insurance) is in place to mitigate any counterparty risk 🙂 Since our initial focus is cross border trade and physical commodities – some of the regulatory complexity is removed. as trading of ‘physical’ commodities is lightly regulated. Biggest compliance is KYC/AML which we comply with https://finance.yahoo.com/news/comdex-completes-over-10m-worth-070800123.html . Some news about Comdex 🙂
Mary | Satoshi Club: Ok, will you need to hold in your hands an original of my paper asset before it’s tokenised?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Not me 🙂 But third party verifiers who are whitelisted
Mary | Satoshi Club: Who will check this?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: this, These could range from insurance agents, trade financiers etc. Who are skilled in checking this, It could be digital also – not only paper based – PDF etc. But authenticity will be verified
Mary | Satoshi Club: Can you disclose the name of that third part or there will be a lot of third parts?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: In the spirit of decentralisation there will be multiple third parties, Could also be auditors
Q4 from Telegram Username @PaoloMonte87
One common problem related to NFTs is their monetary evaluation. How will you manage to assess the actual price and its price evolution in time against any stable coin or crypto asset?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Again independent third party verifiers who are experts are determining the valuation of those assets will be responsible. Biggest of them is trade financiers. Trade Finance funds that manage anywhere between 20-100M $ – for them its bread and butter to evaluate the valuation and also risk. We’ll be releasing some big names of trade finance funds we’re collaborating with in the coming time
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, they (experts) will determine its price. You will be just marketplace and platform for trading etc
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Kinda – it is the job of trade finance funds to generate yield. Now Stablecoin holders will be able to generate that yield as well. Participate in generation of yield through ‘real world’ income generating assets
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, that’s right) and this will involve traditional finances into our digital world) Right?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Exactly, This is already happening in general in the industry. E.g. https://www.coindesk.com/makerdao-weighs-accepting-real-world-assets-as-crypto-loan-collateral
Q5 from Telegram Username @cengizhantekin
Congrats on being awarded by ICF. Can you tell us which part of Persistence environment was awarded for what success?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Thank you! We were awarded to create interchain standards for NFTs. today NFTs are primarily only within Ethereum and are not multi-chain. We’re creating natively multi-chain NFTs
Mary | Satoshi Club: In simple words, i will be able to hold my tokenised asset on any chain? Or which chain?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Any chain http://internft.org/ . This website lists some projects we’re working closely with. Still working on making website more marketing friendly, Right now its developer friendly. Its very similar to how ERC721 was created as a standard http://erc721.org/
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, today we are talking a lot about NFTs. But why you need your own token XPRT?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Great question. Outside of working as a Staking and Governance token, the $XPRT tokens functions as a ‘Work token’ – i.e.stakers, delegators of $XPRT token receive cashflows from the dApps in Persistence ecosystem
We’re debating internally whether we should give cashflows directly instead of doing a Buy and Burn. This image explains the work token aspect. Outside of that, as mentioned, the token will be used for staking, governance, validator (dis)incentivization (similar to Kava, Band, Terra etc)
Q6 from Telegram user @askarovich
You claim to solve the problems of the commodity industry. How can you do that with blockchain tech? and have you chosen this one for your service, it is not very known in crypto. There are rather other online services
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Commodity trading and trade finance is one of the most well known use cases of Blockchain tech as there are so many stakeholders involved. In general, however, private blockchains such as Hyperledger and Corda are used to tackle this use case. We wanted to do it using Public Blockchains. Tried building on Ethereum and Waves. But ultimately decided to build on Tendermint due to the app-chain specific structure which suited us the best
Some problems we are trying to solve in traditional finance
Some problems that we’re trying to solve with DeFi
D. | Satoshi Club: looks like you made a right choice with Tendermint
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: :))
Mary | Satoshi Club: Any plans for non-commodity assets?) Real estate, for example?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Yes, But longer term. As there are more regulatory battles to be fought there. Initial focus will be ‘physical’ commodities
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes))) you are right) hope, after success with this you will move forward to solve also this problem)
Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community
Q1 from Telegram user @Nickkiii
Can you give us more details on how the upcoming Persistence Stake drop campaign would run ?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: Read more about it here: https://medium.com/persistence-blog/pos-token-holders-prepare-yourselves-for-persistence-stakedrop-the-grand-unveiling-d5f6ca6ddc40
We launched a detailed mechanism.
Q2 from Telegram user @Allen010
There are many other projects similar to you So what makes you different from them and what is the advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about ?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence:
Q3 from Telegram user @Winterkom
What is the importance of Persistence Validators? Is it still possible to be a validator?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence:
These are some of the validators validating for Persistence ecosystem currently – 80% of them are in the top 20 validator set for Tendermint chains such as BAND, KAVA, Cosmos itself. These are some of the validators validating for Persistence ecosystem currently – 80% of them are in the top 20 validator set for Tendermint chains such as BAND, KAVA, Cosmos itself
Q4 from Telegram user @JoxesXIII
What are the reasons and purposes of having built Persistence on Cosmos SDK technology? Can you list some notable advantages?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: The Cosmos SDK not only allows Persistence the ability to take advantage of the ‘Inter-blockchain Communication Module’ (IBC) being launched by Cosmos, but also allows for Persistence to create its own ecosystem of application specific chains which leads to an exponentially higher level of scalability. Through the use of the Cosmos IBC module, stablecoins from various networks integrated with the Cosmos IBC can be interoperably transacted on the Persistence App where these assets can be deployed to finance real world commodity trades. In addition, the Cosmos Hub/Zone structure allows for applications built on Persistence to have their own chain (zone) for application specific transactions while transactions pertaining to the native Persistence token occur on the hub.
Q5 from Telegram user @jpsarmah
‘’Persistence is shaping up to be a major building block in this financial revolution and we’re proud to be supporting their journey.”- Michael Arrington. What is this financial revolution that he is talking about and what possibilities will it bring for traditional finance users?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence:
Q6 from Telegram user @huydo
I see XPRT listed on Uniswap, is it real and when XPRT listing more exchanges?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: https://t.me/PersistenceOne/98 . Not real
Q7 from Telegram user @KhaleesiTheCryptoLady
While preparing for the launch of your $XRPT token sale, you introduced Persistence Stakedrop for the community? What is the process of this campaign and why do a Stakedrop? What do you want to achieve?
Mikhil Pandey | Persistence: So the goal of Stakedrop is to ensure as wide a distribution of our $XPRT tokens as possible. Usually we see airdrops where users get a random token drop without having to do anything or infact without even wanting these tokens at times. Stakedrop is a unique way for us to distribute our tokens to people who are familiar with Staking and want access to our tokens. To participate in stakedrop, all one has to do is stake their tokens on the networks we have mentioned on our website, and provide a proof of it. The process is highlighted in the medium blog post we published today https://medium.com/@PersistenceOne/pos-token-holders-prepare-yourselves-for-persistence-stakedrop-the-grand-unveiling-d5f6ca6ddc40
Q8 from Telegram user @K2ice
In this era of negative interest rates, SMEs find it difficult to secure financing. How does Persistence aim to support SMEs/cross-border traders?
Tushar Aggarwal | Persistence: Great question – Persistence along with Comdex works with SME/ME trade finance funds globally to facilitate easier access to financing for the SME traders
Q9 from Telegram user @Catsomnia
What are your plans on GLOBAL adoption? Which country is presently focused on ?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: Our current area of focus are the main trading hubs in Middle east, South and Southeast Asia – Malaysia, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong. We will be gradually expanding to other major hubs.
Q10 from Telegram user @kun4321
“Protocol Powering Institutional Decentralized Finance”. What message do you want to send to your users?
Mikhil Pandey | Persistence: Persistence is bridging Traditional finance and DeFi. To do so, we follow a two-pronged approach, by catering to Institutional use cases as well as serving the crypto native users. In our case, Comdex is an Institutional focussed application while the stablecoin lending/borrowing platform is a cryptonative application which serves DeFi users. Please read more about this here: https://medium.com/persistence-blog/issue-01-introducing-persistence-ff778a9b7022
Q11 from Telegram user @Allen010
There are many other projects similar to you So what makes you different from them and what is the advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about ?
Mikhil Pandey | Persistence:
Q12 from Telegram user @topind7
Is this a universal project ? Can every of the communities part take in the project ?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: Yes, we are inclusive of all the communities and stakeholders such as – Validators, Delegators, Crypto as well as Institutional users. As mentioned earlier, the first application our ecosystem already has a significant traction and bringing commodity trading organisations on board as well as community initiatives such as StakeDrop provide the entire Crypto community to have exposure to $XPRT. Read more here: https://medium.com/persistence-blog/pos-token-holders-prepare-yourselves-for-persistence-stakedrop-the-grand-unveiling-d5f6ca6ddc40?source=collection_home—4——0———————– . Also you can join our community: https://t.me/PersistenceOneChat
Q13 from Telegram user @yadav_199
how Persistence Protocol empowers Institutional Open Finance and how you solve inefficiencies in cross border payments and business financing ?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: You can read about it in detail here: https://medium.com/persistence-blog/persistences-focus-on-open-finance-the-digital-asset-exchange-marketplace-use-case-95cb5d91f4d3
Q14 from Telegram user @Splendicity
I can see you plan to use XPRT token in your ecosystem. Is a going to be your governance or secondary token?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: The token plays 3 keys roles:
1. Staking token (similar to other Tendermint based chains like Band, Kava, Terra, Iris)
2. Governance of the chain (not app)
3. Work token (stakers and delegators receive cashflows from the Persistence native and Comdex dApp as well as other dApps in the future)
Q15 from Telegram user @ngoccam
Could you please explain to me about StakeDrop, how to join and its mechanism?
Abhitej Singh | Persistence: Read here: https://medium.com/persistence-blog/pos-token-holders-prepare-yourselves-for-persistence-stakedrop-the-grand-unveiling-d5f6ca6ddc40
Part 3 – Quiz Results
In the final part we would like you to check your knowledge in terms of Persistence. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part, so everyone could be a part and answer. All the correct answers you will find at the bottom of this Recap. Enjoy!
Q1
What’s Persistence working on?
A. DeFi
B. NFTs
C. Infrastructure
D. All of the above
Q2
Persistence One is a ____ chain.
A. PoW
B. PoS
C. dPoS
S. PoA
Q3
First application in the Persistence One ecosystem, Comdex, solves the problems in ___ industry.
A. Real-estate
B. Commodity Trading
C. Securities
D. Automobile
Q4
Persistence Network has which 7 networks in their Stakedrop Campaign?
A. Cosmos, Polkadot, Kava, Akash, IRIS, Terra, Thorchain
B. Cosmos, Polkadot, Kava, Matic, Tezos, Kusama, IRIS
C. Cosmos, Polkadot, Matic, Terra, Tron, Kava, Tezos
D. Cosmos, Polkadot, Terra, IRIS, Kava, Tezos, Matic
Answers
1. D
2. dPoS
3. B
4. D
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Persistence Community: https://t.me/PersistenceOneChat