Cronos (CRO) is the native cryptocurrency token of Cronos Chain — a decentralized, open-source blockchain developed by the Crypto.com payment, trading and financial services company.

Cronos Chain is one of the products in Crypto.com’s lineup of solutions designed to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrencies as a means of increasing personal control over money, safeguarding user data and protecting users’ identities. The CRO blockchain serves primarily as a vehicle that powers the Crypto.com Pay mobile payments app.

In the future, Crypto.com plans to expand the reach of the CRO platform to power its other products as well.

CRO went live in November-December 2018.


## Who Are the Founders of Cronos?

Cronos was launched by the Crypto.com company as part of its vision of “putting cryptocurrency in every wallet.” Crypto.com itself was founded in June 2016 as “Monaco Technologies GmbH” by Kris Marszalek, Rafael Melo, Gary Or and Bobby Bao.

Kris Marszalek, an alum of the Polish Adam Mickiewicz University, has founded and headed three companies prior to starting Crypto.com: consumer electronics design and manufacturing business Starline Polska, location-based service mobile app and platform YIYI and the e-commerce firm BEECRAZY.

Rafael Melo earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering from the PUC-Rio. Over his more than 15-year-long career in finance, Melo has worked with major companies in Asia and helped secure over 50 million AUD in funding for the Ensogo social commerce website.

Gary Or is a software engineer with over nine years of fullstack engineering experience. Prior to co-founding Crypto.com, Or worked as platform architect at Ensogo and co-founded the mobile app development firm Foris. He received his bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science from the University of Hong Kong.

Before helping launch Crypto.com, Bobby Bao worked in the M&A department of the China Renaissance investment bank. Bao has studied at the University of Melbourne, NYU Stern School of Business and the College of William & Mary.


## What Makes Cronos Unique?

CRO blockchain is mainly focused on providing utility to the users of Crypto.com’s payment, trading and financial services solutions.

CRO owners can stake their coins on the Crypto.com Chain to act as a validator and earn fees for processing transactions on the network. Additionally, CRO coins can be used to settle transaction fees on the Cronos Chain.

Within the framework of the Crypto.com Pay payments app, users can get cashback of up to 20% by paying merchants in CRO and up to 10% by purchasing gift cards and making peer-to-peer transfers to other users.

When it comes to trading use cases, the Crypto.com App allows users to earn token rewards for select listings by staking CRO.

Additionally, users can earn annual interest of up to 10-12% on their Crypto.com Coins by staking them on either the Crypto.com Exchange app or Crypto.com’s metal Visa Card.

Overall, CRO acts as an instrument that powers Crypto.com’s drive to increase the adoption of cryptocurrencies on a global scale. As such, the company is continuously working on finding and developing new use cases that will allow users to leverage the cryptocurrency to enhance the control they have over their money, data and identities.

## Cronos Chain

Cronos Chain, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, was recently launched to run in parallel to Crypto.org blockchain. This is comparable to Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain (EVM-compatible). Cronos Chain’s mainnet beta went live on Nov. 8, 2021, and is built on the Cosmos SDK, utilizing a proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus mechanism. Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility means that the thousands of DApps built on Ethereum can be ported on to the Cronos Chain. Furthermore, it also supports the Inter Blockchain Communications (IBC) protocol, which allows it to bridge to the Cosmos ecosystem of DApps.

Despite the recent launch, growth in total value locked (TVL) has skyrocketed, reaching a high of over US$2B in less than 3 months. This could be partly attributed to the Particle B $100M CRO EVM fund, which incentivizes developers to build on Cronos. $CRO token prices also rallied by over 350% since the launch, reaching a high of $0.96. Bridge between Ethereum and Cosmos is expected to come in the near future.

## Cronos Galileo update

On January 18, 2023, the Cronos team announced that its latest mainnet upgrade, “Galileo” (version 1.0), had been completed. The upgrade marks the blockchain’s transition out of beta, having handled more than 65 million transactions for more than 1 million users without downtime.

Cronos v1.0 introduces four main improvements:

* Prioritization of mempool to further scale the transaction throughput;
* Optimized node storage, with 30% less storage for full nodes;
* Generalized reduction of node start-up time by approximately 50% plus other node performance improvements;
* New Cosmos features geared towards improved EVM/Cosmos interoperability (IBC incentivization, IBC token transfer memo field).

## Expanded Utility of Cronos (CRO)

Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com continues to maintain that Cronos (CRO) (formerly called Crypto.com Coin) remains one of their major contributions to pushing blockchain and Web 3.0 forward.

Crypto.com launched Cronos Chain as an EVM-compatible sidechain of its flagship Crypto.org Chain. Both chains, as well as the exchange, utilize CRO tokens for various uses.


## How Cronos Chain Has Given CRO a Leg Up?

Cronos Chain hosts various decentralized applications (dApps) and has a total value locked (TVL) of over $781.86 million, at the time of writing, making it one of the largest EVM-compatible chains. It is the first blockchain that enables interoperability between the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems.

Some of the Cronos Chain dApps driving the adoption of CRO by using it as the main payment method for transactions include VVS Finance, Tectonic Finance, Ferro Protocol, MM Finance and Single Finance.


## Cronos Chain Roadmap Progress Will See CRO Utility Advance Further

Cronos Chain has an ambitious roadmap for 2022 from which it has ticked off several achievements made in Q1 and Q2 of the year. One such item is the launch of the Cronos Chain Ambassador Program (CROnauts) to reward active community members.

The launch of the fourth round of the Cronos Ecosystem Grant was also announced in August. Five new projects including Cobo, DeFi.Watch, Robo Vault, Chainstack and Grindery have received grants to develop their dApps after participating in the Cronos Chain Hackathon.

Meanwhile, at the time of writing, items still left on the roadmap for Q4 include the introduction of protocol governance, interchain accounts and the introduction of EVM packets over IBC.


## Crypto.com's Contributions to CRO

The exchange-backed blockchains have not been the only contributors to the adoption of CRO. The increase in activities on Crypto.com during 2021-2022 has given CRO adoption a significant boost.

In 2021, Crypto.com announced its big token burn and permanently removed 70 billion CRO tokens from circulation. The exchange also forged multiple partnerships in a drive to get crypto to up to 1 billion users.