Introduction of Persistence

The above story is reproduced from @Persistence https://medium.com/@PersistenceOne/issue-01-introducing-persistence-ff778a9b7022

Enterprise use-cases for the adoption and widespread usage of Public Blockchain technology have fascinated us for a long time.

Today, however, most implementations at the Enterprise level take place on completely Closed Networks or Private Blockchains such as Hyperledger, R3 Corda, Quorum or other Private Implementations of Ethereum.

Why do Enterprises not use Public Blockchains?

There are a few simple explanations for this:

• Enterprises are reluctant to hold tokens for a variety of reasons:
  - Tokens are volatile
  - Tokens have regulatory uncertainty associated with them
  - Enterprises haven’t figured out custodial and multi-sig practices
  - There is variable transaction fees (gas) — enterprises hate uncertainty!
• Enterprises do not want to expose their transactions or application/business logic publically
• Enterprises do not want to rely on non-KYC’ed validators — they do not want random validators possibly sitting in their parent’s basement validating high-value transactions!

But what are the limitations of Private Blockchains?

• No incentivization/disincentivization at play — what happens if nodes in a Private Blockchain go malicious
• Private Blockchains have not been able to build strong business cases internally in organisations for wide implementation — so far, they have not been able to increase revenues or decrease costs

Introducing Persistence

Persistence:

• Is the Enterprise Hub* of Cosmos powered by Tendermint Core
• Is Hybrid Public/Private in nature — privacy and control of Private Blockchains with Distributed Consensus through third-party validators (Read: Meet our validators)
• Contains SDK (Toolkit) to build Enterprise Grade Applications (leverages Cosmos SDK along with several enterprise-grade functionalities)
• Will contain multiple industry/application/functionality specific Zones (e.g. Comdex for Commodity trading. Potential future Zones to include Logistics, Pharmaceutical, FMCG etc)

*Note — The architecture of Cosmos consists of several independent blockchains called ‘Zones’ attached to a central blockchain called the ‘Hub’.

Similar to the transition of Enterprise Technology from the Intranet to the Internet or from Physical On-Premises Servers to the Cloud, we believe there will be a transition from Private Blockchains to relatively more Public Blockchains.

“We believe that being Private or Public, Permissioned or Permissionless, Closed or Open is not binary. It is a spectrum. Persistence is somewhere in the middle of the two ends of this Spectrum.”

The goal of Persistence is to create the most palatable and digestible ways for Enterprises to use this technology to increase their top line or reduce expenses.

Why now?

We feel like there has been plenty of retail use cases around gaming, gambling and DeFi that have captured the imagination of investors, community members, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in the industry.

However, if the Blockchain industry has to scale to a valuation of trillions of dollars and move from the ‘speculative’ phase to a ‘value creation’ phase, we have to find ways to process high-value transactions, store high-value data and provide tangible results in terms of increase in revenue or decrease in expenses for large enterprises and governments.

Like ‘traditional’ startups, Persistence underwent an intense phase of ideation, followed by rigorous development and several iterations and before finally achieving external validation through real-world implementations and integrations.

Now, after more than a year of remaining in stealth, the team believes that it is time to take Persistence to market. This will allow the Persistence team to rapidly scale up the implementations that it has in its pipeline, boost its team even further and start developing supporters and communities around the world to find even more use cases.

What is unique about Persistence?

The Persistence team has spent a substantial amount of time with professionals in various industries, researchers and experts to find out why Public Blockchains are not preferred at the Enterprise or Government level. Summary of the findings has been highlighted above.

The team then sat down to solve all of the issues that it identified:

• Abstraction of tokens from application layer through what we call the ‘Provable Fiat Ledger’ (working within the limitations of real-world banking transactions but still having distributed consensus through validators)
• Provision of instant settlement in the case of cross border transactions for enterprises, just like a Stablecoin would (but without the use of any token)
• Abstraction of variable transaction fees or gas
• Real-time auditing of financial transactions through the Validators

Its validators

Validators are one of the MOST important stakeholders in the Persistence ecosystem. We have carefully curated a set of globally diversified KYC’ed validators with enterprise-grade architecture.

Criteria for being a Validator for Persistence ‘Hub’ or any of the ‘Enterprise Zones’ in Persistence ecosystem:

• Very good reputation — to socially enforce good behaviour
• High Assets under Delegation — to financially enforce good behaviour
• Physical servers with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) — to ensure security as validators are dealing with extremely high-value transactions
• Open-source code and community contributions — we prefer validators to have contributed to the Cosmos ecosystem (through ecosystem growth or open-source code contributions)

Who is using Persistence currently?

Comdex — Comdex is an end-to-end enterprise SaaS solution for the physical commodity trading market (e.g. metals, grains like wheat, soya, energy products like coal, palm oil etc). It captures the entire lifecycle of the trade from customer/trader onboarding, matching of buyers and sellers and settlement. Trade financing capabilities are to be added to the platform in the coming months.

IXO Foundation — The IXO Foundation is a social impact centric platform currently focused on disrupting the ‘Impact Bond’ market. An ‘Impact Bond’ is an innovative method of incentivizing high net worth individuals and corporate organizations to finance better social outcomes.

Individual case studies that go into more technical depth with regards to the exact integrations of the Persistence SDK into Comdex and IXO Foundation will be released in the near future.

Going forward…

We are huge believers that this industry needs a strong go-to-market. Outside of the above applications, we’ll be working on a wide array of business and government use cases as well as implementations with family-owned conglomerates across South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East (note: as opposed to the West, most enterprises in Asia are run by families). In addition, we’ll be driving engagement with startups and developers through our community initiative, Cosmos India.

In the coming days, we will also be releasing greater details of our technical achievements thus far and our roadmap for the coming months.

We are beyond excited to be on this journey of driving ‘adoption’ and doing our bit to help this industry reach its full potential.