Introduction

The Liquid Staking Hub

Persistence /pəˈsɪst(ə)ns/ noun

the fact of continuing in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.

About Persistence

Persistence is a decentralized Tendermint-based specialized Layer-1 blockchain powering an ecosystem of DeFi applications focused on unlocking the liquidity of staked assets.

Persistence is on a mission to become a true liquid staking hub, offering a seamless and capital-efficient staking and DeFi experience for Proof-of-Stake (PoS) users, by enabling developers to build innovative applications around liquid staked assets.

The Persistence Core-1 chain facilitates the issuance and deployment of liquid-staked stkASSETs via pSTAKE, allowing users to earn staking rewards while participating in DeFi primitives, such as borrowing & lending, and liquidity provisioning on Decentralised Exchanges. Having enabled CosmWasm, the core-1 chain also facilitates the deployment of Dapps via Smart Contracts.

Why Persistence

DeFi (decentralised finance) has vastly enhanced opportunities for users across the financial landscape, offering accessible and highly attractive yield-generating vehicles to the majority of the global population through the blockchain.

At its peak in November 2021, DeFi had grown to $240B+ TVL across various flourishing ecosystems.

Before DeFi’s emergence, staking has been a popular yet conservative strategy where users leverage their idle digital assets to earn attractive yields while also providing security to the underlying network.

Since its inception, the staking industry has seen a phenomenal rise in its overall growth, amassing close to $100 billion in current global staked value and 6.7 million stakers worldwide to date. (Last updated: 27/10/2022)

The problem is that while staking attracts such a large number of participants in their pursuit to earn rewards and provide better network security, significant potential TVL and activity have been siloed away from the DeFi landscape into PoS. Reversely, the emergence of DeFi has highlighted the limited utility that staked assets provide compared to the composability and financial opportunities available in the vibrant DeFi space, thereby taking away from the attractiveness of staking to secure the chain.

Liquid Staking solves this problem, enabling users and their additional liquidity to enter DeFi by allowing PoS token holders to stake and participate in DeFi at the same time. Liquid stakers receive liquid-staked representative tokens that can be used across DeFi ecosystems, while earning rewards from their underlying staked tokens and supporting the underlying networks.

As Liquid Staking becomes more broadly adopted, users are looking for opportunities to put their Liquid Staked Assets to good use and generate more yield. Persistence aims to make that user journey as smooth as possible by offering a wide array of use cases within the ecosystem.