Two years of Cronos - What an adventure! As the saying goes, a year in the crypto world feels like a decade elsewhere.
The past two years have marked a very turbulent (multiple black swan events) yet exciting journey for those deeply embedded in the industry. I’ve had the privilege of being in the front seat, driving growth, and forging partnerships for Cronos, working directly with partners from investment firms, infrastructure projects, application developers, media companies, and many more.
The genesis event for Cronos took place with its first block on November 8, 2021, at 1 AM UTC. The beauty of blockchain lies in its transparency, and anyone can easily verify events on Cronos using Cronoscan. Take a look at the Genesis Block!
The Cronos Story
Many may recognize Cronos as the “Crypto.com Chain” since the gas token required for transactions on the chain is “$CRO.” We’re fortunate to have Crypto.com as a key supporter of the chain, playing a significant role in Cronos’ growth. At its core, Cronos is an EVM Layer 1 chain built on the Cosmos-SDK, enabling Solidity developers to create decentralized applications on Cronos.
The Layer 1 & Layer 2 blockchain space is indeed highly competitive, with new chains launching frequently (If you are on Crypto Twitter, you will see news of a new blockchain launching every other week). What sets Cronos apart from other networks is its niche and access to a large and growing retail user base from Crypto.com, known as the “CROFam.” This has been a strong competitive advantage for the chain from day one.
Crypto.com has embedded its mission to onboard the next billion users through attractive and useful products like the Crypto.com Debit Card and the Exchange. With new users onboarded into Crypto.com, we witnessed that as they delve deeper into the crypto space, they tend to experience their first decentralized applications on Cronos. This could include swapping tokens on VVS Finance (a Decentralized Exchange), trading NFTs on Ebisus Bay (an NFT marketplace), or playing D.G.Pals (an on-chain game). With this in mind, many applications on Cronos tailor their products to be easily understood and have a consumer-friendly onboarding UI/UX, which aids in user acquisition and retention.
A throwback to the early days of Cronos Mainnet launch, I still vividly remember the sky-high yield farming rewards on VVS finance and multiple successful NFT launches every other week. It was certainly a very exciting moment in the history of Cronos.
When it comes to building a blockchain ecosystem, two critical factors come to mind: improving the technical stack and enhancing the developer ecosystem. Both of which we have deeply focused on over the past 2 years.
Technical Improvements, Two Years In:
Over the past two years, the Cronos development and R&D team have focused on further developing and optimizing the Cronos tech stack through multiple mainnet upgrades. Some of the major highlights include:
- Introducing dynamic fee structure and EIP-1559 (v0.7.0 upgrade)
- Refactoring of EVM StateDB Implementation to enhance the volume of transactions being processed on Cronos (v0.7.0 upgrade)
- Enabling Mempool prioritization to enable transaction prioritization (v1.0 upgrade)
- Implementing Custom Transaction Indexer to optimize node storage for full and archive nodes (v1.0 upgrade)
- More reliable public JSON-RPC endpoints improving UX for all Cronos users
- VersionDB database instead of RocksDB for nodes, leading to 62% smaller node storage requirements.
- Enabling app-specific optimistic roll-ups to be built on top of Cronos Mainnet, powered by Caldera.
Developer Ecosystem, Two Years In:
Blockchains are often evaluated based on the number of applications, transactions, and active users. The Cronos ecosystem has grown significantly since its inception two years ago, particularly in the key verticals of DeFi, NFTs, and Gaming. For those new to the Cronos ecosystem, you can find an overview on our Discover page or in one of our latest blog posts.
We have doubled down on our efforts to provide a strong developer ecosystem for those building on Cronos. This includes:
Forming strategic partnerships with key infrastructure partners
This is critical to ensure that developers who are building on Cronos have access to the required infrastructure & service partners for them to seamlessly launch their decentralized applications
- Oracles (E.g. Band, Pyth, Witnet)
- Commercial-grade Node Providers & API Providers (E.g. Blockdaemon, Chainstack, Rockx, Unmarshal)
- Subgraphs (E.g. Subquery)
- Wallet Providers (E.g. Metamask, Crypto.com Defi wallet)
- Data Analytics Toolings (E.g. Bubble maps, Footprint Analytics, Covalent, Sentio, NFTScan)
- Cloud Services (E.g. AWS, GCP)
Introducing support programs
We have launched several support programs to ensure projects building on Cronos have a strong chance to achieve a successful go-to-market launch and subsequent growth on the network.
- Cronos Hackathons — Hackathons catered towards new developers to build on Cronos and win bounties
- Cronos Builders Program — Provisioning of discounts and credits to offset developers' infrastructure costs, and provide additional marketing support
- Cronos Grants Program — Milestone-based grant funding with strategic milestones
- Cronos Accelerator Program — Providing strategic mentorship, masterclasses, and investments
Providing PR and marketing support
Distribution is key, especially in the early stages of a start-up lifecycle. We see ourselves as the middle layer between an application and its end users. Over the two years, we have pushed out several initiatives to help applications that are building on Cronos with their PR and marketing.
- Cronos Ecosystem Spotlight — articles to highlight project stories and their achievements on Cronos
- Cronos AMA — bi-weekly Twitter Spaces AMA providing a platform for applications to engage the CROFam Twitter community.
- Strategic social media amplifications — Retweets of key project updates to amplify it to Cronos’ >200k follower base.
- Campaigns with Crypto.com — Leveraging Crypto.com’s reach for marketing such as NFT launches, wallet campaigns, and strategic newsletter features
The Road Ahead
The big-picture goal remains unchanged. Cronos aims to scale DeFi, NFT, and Gaming applications massively and facilitate frictionless end-user access. With our strategic partnership with Crypto.com, we intend to empower the large and ever growing #CROfam community and provide them with the tools to experience the full promise of self-custody across DeFi and gaming.
Here’s to another year of new collaborations, technological improvements, and braving through the markets.
