Blockchain and trade finance have always seemed like natural partners, and an India-based company is attempting to leverage this arrangement.
Persistence's business strategy
Persistence has built the back-end infrastructure for a trade finance system that will make it easier for small and medium-sized buyers to find funding to purchase commodities, while traveling between Asia's major trading hubs, in places like Singapore , Hong Kong and Dubai.
The startup closed a $ 3,7 million token sale round led by Arrington XRP (here quotation real), along with Alameda Research and South Korean stablecoin company Terra, among others. Supporters are buying the Persistence token, or XPRT, which is expected to be released later this year or early next year once macroeconomic conditions appear to have stabilized, said Tushar Aggarwal, CEO of Persistence.
“Commodities trading is a notoriously difficult industry to break into,” Aggarwal said, noting that other companies like Perlin and Centrifuge have already entered this space. The advantage of Persistence, according to Aggarwal, lies more in its business development strategy than in its technology.
To create an application that would appeal to companies outside the blockchain sector, Persistence chose Tendermint as its entry level, having researched both Ethereum and Waves. “One of our main objectives is the institutional figures. From an institutional point of view we have tried to abstract some of the complexity, ”Aggarwal said.
How Persistence works
The trade finance platform was created as a separate Persistence-based application called Comdex. This platform has been handed over to a third party who already has access to the commercial finance sector.
Invoices are transformed into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which can then be secured to support the loans. Comdex's website shows that its CEO is Uday Joshi, whose LinkedIn page shows that he has an additional role at Rhodium Resources.
Joshi is also featured in Rhodium's corporate brochure, in which the company is described as specializing in “physical commodity trading and commercial logistics,” with access to over $ 1 billion in credit lines for trade finance.
Although it is now only a testnet, Aggarwal said that "$ 41 million worth of commodities has been tokenized on the chain, which also represents the volume of transactions." Since the XPRT token is not yet active, Comdex and Persistence are simply testing the technology now and tracking the performance of the validators on the testnet, ready to back up the chain in case there is some kind of failure. Once Persistence implements the mainnet, its validators will be rewarded in XPRT.
