Persistence, a Singapore-based startup focussing on powering institutional Decentralised Finance and Open Finance (DeFi/OpFi) adoption, has secured US$3.7 million in an investment round, led by Arrington XRP Capital, a blockchain VC firm headed by TechCrunch and CrunchBase founder Michael Arrington.
The round was joined by LuneX Ventures, the crypto arm of Golden Gate Ventures, IOSG Ventures (China), Spark Digital Capital, Woodstock Fund (India), Incrypt (crypto arm of First Principles VC).
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Singapore- and Hong Kong-based Genesis Block HK, NGC Ventures, Alameda Research, South Korea-based Terraform Labs, as well as prominent blockchain industry personalities Richard Ma (Founder of Quantstamp) and Danish Chaudhry (Head of Bitcoin.com Exchange) also participated.
Started in 2019 by Tushar Aggarwal (CEO), an early member of the LuneX team, Persistence was established to expand the scope of DeFi/OpFi by providing the tools for institutional adoption. This is achieved by tokenising real-world assets (such as invoices) and putting them on the blockchain.
These assets can then be used by companies as collateral for acquiring loans and can be traded on decentralised marketplaces in their tokenised form.
“We’ve laid the technical groundwork for a new era of blockchain-powered real-world value creation and we have built a strong network of strategic partners. It is time to push ahead full-force on our mission to bring institutions and real-world assets to DeFi to help the industry to reach its full potential,” said Aggarwal.
The first use case of Persistence is Comdex, an end-to-end physical commodity trading and trade financing platform that has processed US$41 million in transaction volume.
Bills of lading and resulting invoices can be tokenised on the Comdex platform using Persistence technology. This provides multiple benefits in terms of creation of an audit trail for an industry that still uses paper-based documentation, faster cross-border settlements and easier access to trade finance opportunities for SME/ME commodity traders.
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Arrington said: “A core goal of Arrington XRP Capital is to assist blockchain innovators to create value in the real-world. The merging of blockchain and fintech is beginning to usher in a new era of open finance which is poised to transform global finance mechanisms. Persistence is shaping up to be a major building block in this financial revolution and we’re proud to be supporting their journey.”
According to Persistence, blockchain wields the ability to solve the inefficiencies in cross-border payments and business financing, which in turn opens the floodgates to allow a torrent of new capital into the crypto ecosystem, enabling DeFi to emerge from its crypto-focused cocoon and thrive.
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Photo by Pascal Bernardonon Unsplash
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