Startup Deep Dive : Persistence – a Sequoia-and-Binance-backed Cosmos staking pioneer whose token fell from about $16 to under a cent

In November 2021, four of crypto’s best-known names — Three Arrows Capital, Galaxy Digital, Sequoia Capital India and DeFiance Capital — led a $10 million (about ₹96 crore) round into pSTAKE, the liquid-staking product of an India-origin Web3 company called Persistence. Six months earlier, Persistence’s XPRT token had touched an all-time high near $16.5. As of late September 2026, that same token trades for less than a cent, and the on-chain deposits that once defined the project have drained to essentially nothing.

This is the story of a company that arrived early to two ideas the market later loved — tokenising real-world trade finance, and then liquid staking for the Cosmos ecosystem — raised money from some of the industry’s marquee backers, and then rode the full round-trip of the 2021 boom and the collapses that followed. It is a deep dive into what Persistence actually built, who paid for it, how a crypto protocol makes money, and why the gap between a token’s market value and a company’s real business is the single most important thing to understand here.

Quick facts

What Persistence does

Persistence sells blockchain infrastructure and decentralised-finance products rather than a consumer app or a physical good. Its work spans a purpose-built layer-1 chain and a set of protocols that sit on top of it and across other chains.

• Persistence Core-1: a Tendermint-based, Cosmos-ecosystem layer-1 network. Its mainnet launched on 30 March 2021 (company history page), positioning the chain as a specialised hub for liquid-staking finance.
• pSTAKE: a liquid-staking protocol. Users stake proof-of-stake tokens and receive a liquid, tradeable representation (for example stkATOM for staked ATOM), so their capital keeps earning staking rewards while remaining usable in DeFi. pSTAKE describes itself as the first liquid-staking platform for Cosmos (company-stated first-mover claim, per Gate and Messari).
• Dexter: an interchain decentralised exchange for yield-generating assets, launched on Core-1 in March 2023 (Dexter/Medium), designed to trade liquid-staked and interest-bearing tokens.
• BTCFi pivot: since 2024, Persistence has repositioned around Bitcoin DeFi, describing itself on exchange listings as “building the BTCFi Liquidity Hub” for near zero-slippage swaps of BTC-variants (CoinGecko/CoinMarketCap listing text, September 2026).

The customers are, in effect, token holders, stakers and DeFi users across the Cosmos and, more recently, the Bitcoin and BNB Chain ecosystems — not enterprises paying invoices.

The origin: trade finance before staking

Persistence did not begin as a staking company. It began with a much more traditional problem: the slow, paper-heavy, trust-scarce world of cross-border trade and commodity finance. The founding thesis, as the team described it, was to use public blockchains and open-finance rails to remove inefficiencies in business financing and cross-border payments, starting with the commodity-trading industry, which they saw as archaic and hard to audit.

The flagship application was Comdex, an institutional-facing commodities trading and trade-financing platform that covered the transaction lifecycle from onboarding through settlement and financing, using tokenised invoices — represented on-chain as NFTs — so that real-world assets could be used as collateral. In October 2020, CoinDesk reported the pitch plainly in its headline, calling Persistence an Indian trade-finance startup that had just raised $3.7 million in a token sale led by Arrington XRP Capital.

The people behind it mattered to that early credibility. Tushar Aggarwal, the CEO, had previously founded LuneX Ventures, an early crypto-focused venture fund in Southeast Asia, and had been active in the space since the mid-2010s. Alongside CTO Deepanshu Tripathi, he made an early architectural bet: rather than a private, permissioned chain, Persistence would build on Tendermint and Cosmos, wagering that a public, interoperable proof-of-stake network would matter more over time than a walled garden. That single decision — public and interoperable over private and controlled — is what later made the pivot into liquid staking possible at all.

The struggle years and the pivots

Persistence’s history is a sequence of pivots, and each one left something behind. The trade-finance vision was real but slow; institutional commodity finance is a hard, relationship-heavy business to move on-chain, and Comdex eventually took its own path as a separate project rather than remaining Persistence’s centre of gravity. The company’s attention shifted from tokenising invoices to a problem that DeFi users felt every day: staked capital was locked and idle.

That shift produced pSTAKE and, in 2021, Persistence’s own layer-1 chain. But the timing put the company directly in the path of the worst year crypto has had. Several of the names closest to Persistence’s cap table and community imploded within months of each other. The Terra/LUNA ecosystem collapsed in May 2022, erasing tens of billions of dollars in value; Terra’s founder Do Kwon had been listed among the angel investors in pSTAKE’s November 2021 round. Three Arrows Capital, a lead investor in that same round, filed for bankruptcy in June 2022. And in November 2022, FTX and its affiliated trading firm Alameda Research — Alameda had also participated in the pSTAKE raise — collapsed into bankruptcy. A young protocol does not control its backers’ balance sheets, but when this many of them fail in a single year, the reputational and liquidity damage is real.

Then came a second, structural squeeze. The 2024–2025 wave moved toward Bitcoin DeFi, and Persistence pivoted again — from a Cosmos liquid-staking hub toward a BTCFi liquidity product. That market proved brutally cyclical too: BTCFi total value locked peaked near $9.1 billion in October 2025 before Layer-2 sidechain TVL contracted by more than 74% into early 2026 (Spark research, 2026). Persistence has spent much of its life building the right product slightly ahead of, or slightly to the side of, where the money actually pooled.

The turning point: liquid staking and the $10M round

The clearest turning point was the bet on liquid staking and the capital that followed it. In 2021, pSTAKE launched liquid staking for Cosmos’s ATOM, and the idea landed. According to industry write-ups, stkATOM drew more than $35 million in TVL around that launch — evidence that the market wanted exactly this: staking yield without giving up liquidity.

The validation arrived on 16 November 2021, when pSTAKE closed a $10 million (about ₹96 crore) seed round. The Block reported the round as led by Three Arrows Capital, Galaxy Digital, Sequoia Capital India and DeFiance Capital, with a long list of additional backers. Investors received PSTAKE tokens, with some XPRT as an added benefit, and the company said it planned to expand liquid staking to more chains and to grow a team then numbered around 35. On the two sides of this turning point sit two very different numbers: a project raising $10 million from top-tier funds on one side, and, roughly three and a half months later, pSTAKE’s on-chain deposits peaking at about $60.27 million on 4 March 2022 (DefiLlama). That peak, as it turned out, was close to the top.

The money behind it

Persistence and its pSTAKE product raised across several rounds, from a broad set of crypto-native investors. The figures below are the disclosed round sizes; note that a token project’s fundraising is not the same as company revenue.

• Q4 2020 — about $3.7 million in a token sale led by Arrington XRP Capital, with participants including Alameda Research and Terra (CoinDesk headline, October 2020; Tracxn). This financed the trade-finance-era Persistence.
• March 2021 — XPRT public sale concluded on 31 March 2021 on AscendEX at a price of $0.40 per token (company blog/Medium). Genesis supply was set at 100 million XPRT (CoinLore).
• 16 November 2021 — $10 million (about ₹96 crore) seed for pSTAKE, led by Three Arrows Capital, Galaxy Digital, Sequoia Capital India and DeFiance Capital (The Block).
• Also in that round: Coinbase Ventures, Tendermint Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Alameda Research, Sino Global Capital and Spartan Group, plus angels including Terra’s Do Kwon and Aave’s Ajit Tripathi, and staking providers Stake.fish, Figment, Everstake and Chorus One (The Block; Global Fintech Series).
• 10 May 2022 — Binance Labs strategic investment in pSTAKE, amount undisclosed, aimed at building BNB Chain liquid staking (Binance blog; Finance Magnates).

What each backer changed is worth naming. Arrington XRP Capital gave the trade-finance-era company its first institutional credibility. Sequoia Capital India, Galaxy Digital and Three Arrows Capital turned pSTAKE from a Cosmos experiment into a funded, watched project in the 2021 bull market. Binance Labs, in May 2022, pushed pSTAKE beyond Cosmos and onto BNB Chain, broadening it from a single-ecosystem tool toward a multichain protocol. No verified post-money valuation for any of these rounds appears in the sources reviewed here, so none is asserted.

How a liquid-staking protocol makes money

The economics of a liquid-staking protocol are different from a normal company, and conflating them is the mistake to avoid. The money flows work roughly like this:

• Money in: users deposit a proof-of-stake asset (say ATOM) and receive a liquid staked token (stkATOM). The underlying is staked with validators and earns network staking rewards.
• The take: liquid-staking protocols typically keep a protocol fee — a percentage of the staking rewards passing through — as their core revenue line. Persistence has not published a single headline take-rate figure in the sources opened for this piece, so no specific fee is asserted here.
• The DEX layer: Dexter, the interchain DEX, adds trading fees on swaps of liquid-staked and yield-bearing assets, and routes liquidity between them.
• Costs out: validator operations, security audits, engineering, token incentives paid to bootstrap liquidity (for example, PSTAKE emissions used to seed pools), and market-making.

The part people get wrong: XPRT’s market capitalisation and pSTAKE’s TVL are not the company’s revenue. Market cap is what the token trades at multiplied by circulating supply. TVL is other people’s deposited capital, on which the protocol earns only a thin fee. A protocol can show tens of millions in TVL while the company itself books only a small fraction of that as actual income — and when TVL leaves, that fee income leaves with it.

The numbers: token and TVL, not revenue

Because Persistence does not publish audited company financials, the honest quantitative record here is on-chain and market data, not a revenue-and-profit statement. The table below shows token and protocol metrics only, and should not be read as company revenue.

The arc is unambiguous. XPRT fell from a peak near $16.5 in 2021 to under a cent by late 2026 — a decline of well over 99% from the high. pSTAKE’s tracked deposits rose to roughly $60 million in early 2022 and have since drained to essentially zero on DefiLlama’s measure. Genesis supply was 100 million XPRT (CoinLore); circulating supply has since grown to roughly 213–271 million tokens (CoinMarketCap; CoinGecko), reflecting the staking-reward inflation typical of Cosmos-SDK chains, which itself dilutes holders over time.

Where the value came from

For a protocol, the equivalent of a segment split is which chains and products the deposited value flowed through. Persistence’s value base moved in three phases:

• Cosmos first: the original TVL came from Cosmos staking, led by stkATOM, which drew $35 million-plus around its 2021 launch (blocmates) and drove pSTAKE’s climb to its roughly $60 million peak in March 2022 (DefiLlama).
• BNB Chain next: Binance Labs’ May 2022 investment pushed pSTAKE onto BNB Chain, adding a second large ecosystem beyond Cosmos (Binance blog).
• Bitcoin most recently: the 2024–2025 pivot pointed the product at Bitcoin DeFi; DefiLlama now tracks pSTAKE’s remaining chain footprint as Bitcoin, with a TVL reading of essentially zero as of 24 September 2026.

The surprise sits inside that progression: the company kept following the dominant DeFi narrative — Cosmos, then BNB, then Bitcoin — but the deposited value did not stay with it through the transitions. Chasing each new ecosystem is not the same as retaining capital across them, and Persistence’s TVL history is a case study in how quickly protocol deposits can migrate away once incentives and market cycles turn.

The risks

• Deposit and fee collapse: a liquid-staking protocol’s economics are a thin fee on TVL. With pSTAKE TVL at essentially zero on DefiLlama as of 24 September 2026, the fee base that funds the business has all but disappeared — the most concrete risk here has already partly materialised.
• Token dilution and price decay: XPRT trades under a cent with a market cap under roughly $1.2 million (late September 2026), while Cosmos-style staking inflation keeps expanding supply from a 100 million genesis toward the low hundreds of millions of tokens — a structural headwind for price even before market sentiment.
• Counterparty and reputational contagion: multiple backers and angels tied to the 2021 round later failed — Three Arrows Capital (bankrupt June 2022), Alameda Research (bankrupt November 2022) and Terra’s Do Kwon (LUNA collapse May 2022). Association with failed sponsors raises trust and liquidity costs for a small protocol.
• Narrative and cycle dependence: the BTCFi sector Persistence pivoted into peaked near $9.1 billion in October 2025 and then saw Layer-2 sidechain TVL fall more than 74% into 2026 (Spark research), so even a well-built product is exposed to a fast-cooling category.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Persistence is about the difference between being early and being durable. The company made genuinely good calls: choosing a public, interoperable chain over a private one; spotting liquid staking before it became a crowded category; attracting some of the most respected investors in crypto. None of that was luck. Yet a protocol’s health lives or dies on retained deposits and real fee income, and those proved far more fragile than the fundraising headlines suggested. Raising $10 million from Sequoia and Galaxy, and watching TVL touch $60 million, felt like proof of a business; the drain back toward zero showed how much of that was cycle rather than moat. For anyone reading a Web3 project, the discipline is to separate the three numbers that get blurred together — token market cap, on-chain TVL, and the company’s actual revenue — and to trust the last one least when it is the one nobody will show you.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Persistence and where is it from?

Persistence was started in 2019 and came out of stealth on 3 January 2020, founded by CEO Tushar Aggarwal, who previously ran the crypto VC fund LuneX Ventures, with Deepanshu Tripathi as CTO. It is an India-origin Web3 company; CoinDesk described it in 2020 as an Indian trade-finance startup.

What is the difference between Persistence, pSTAKE and XPRT?

Persistence (Persistence One) is the company and its Cosmos-based layer-1 chain, Core-1. pSTAKE is its liquid-staking protocol. XPRT is the native token of the Persistence chain, while PSTAKE is a separate token tied to the pSTAKE protocol.

How much has Persistence raised?

Disclosed rounds include about $3.7 million in a 2020 token sale led by Arrington XRP Capital, a $10 million pSTAKE seed round in November 2021 led by Three Arrows Capital, Galaxy Digital, Sequoia Capital India and DeFiance Capital, and an undisclosed Binance Labs strategic investment in May 2022.

Why has the XPRT token fallen so much?

XPRT peaked near $16.5 in 2021 and traded under a cent by late September 2026, a fall of more than 99%. Contributing factors include the broad 2022 crypto downturn, the failure of several associated backers, staking-reward inflation of the token supply, and a collapse in pSTAKE’s on-chain deposits, which DefiLlama shows near zero.

Is Persistence still operating?

Persistence continues to describe itself on exchange listings as building a BTCFi liquidity hub for Bitcoin DeFi as of September 2026. However, its DefiLlama-tracked TVL reads near zero and its token market cap is under roughly $1.2 million, so the scale of the business is far below its 2021–2022 peak.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• The Block — pSTAKE $10 million seed round and investor list (November 2021)
• Global Fintech Series — Three Arrows Capital, Sequoia Capital India, Galaxy Digital and DeFiance Capital invest in pSTAKE (November 2021)
• CoinDesk — “Indian Trade Finance Startup Raises $3.7M in Token Sale Led by Arrington XRP” (October 2020)
• Binance Blog / Finance Magnates — Binance Labs strategic investment in pSTAKE (May 2022)
• DefiLlama — pSTAKE Finance TVL history and current value (accessed September 2026)
• CoinGecko — XPRT price, market cap, supply and all-time high (September 2026)
• CoinMarketCap — XPRT price, market cap and all-time high dated 15 May 2021 (September 2026)
• CoinLore — XPRT genesis supply and ICO/tokenomics (accessed September 2026)
• Messari — Persistence project profile, founding and products (accessed September 2026)
• Persistence company blog / history page and Medium — Core-1 mainnet 30 March 2021, XPRT public sale 31 March 2021, Dexter launch March 2023 (2021–2024)
• blocmates — Persistence and pSTAKE TVL and ecosystem overview (2024)
• Spark research — BTCFi TVL peak and 2026 contraction (2026)
• crypto.news / Bloomberg — 2022 collapses of Terra/LUNA, Three Arrows Capital and FTX/Alameda (2022)

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