Cronos (CRO) CRO

Cronos (CRO) is the native coin of the Cronos blockchains, a network built by and around Crypto.com. CRO pays the gas on the Cronos EVM chain, is staked to secure the Cronos POS Chain and gives those stakers a vote on protocol changes. It started life as the token of the Crypto.com exchange and app, and the tie between Cronos CRO and that company has never loosened.

The October 2026 picture is crowded. The 70 billion CRO burned in 2021 were created again by a vote in March 2025. A Trump Media treasury plan built on CRO was cancelled in August 2026, three weeks before validators rolled the chain back to recover funds drained from a lending protocol. In September, Cronos Labs tied the coin’s future to Ult, a trading app whose revenue is now meant to buy CRO and burn it. The project’s home has also moved, from cronos.org to cronos.com.

What is Cronos CRO? One asset in three forms

Cronos describes itself as a network where trades in stocks, crypto and prediction markets settle on one shared ledger, with CRO as the asset that secures it.

CRO exists in three forms: the native coin of the Cronos POS Chain, the native coin of Cronos EVM and, in its original shape, an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Bridges move it between them. CoinGecko files it both as a layer 1 and as an exchange token, and both labels fit: the company that issued CRO also builds most of what it is used for.

Cronos Group, the Canadian cannabis company listed as CRON, is unrelated.

Two chains running, a third closing: how Cronos works

Cronos POS Chain, the staking layer

The older chain launched as Crypto.org Chain; its renaming to Cronos POS Chain was announced in August 2023, with no protocol change, according to reports at the time. It runs on the Cosmos SDK with CometBFT consensus, formerly Tendermint, a form of proof of stake in which validators lock CRO and take turns signing blocks. One CRO equals 100 million basecro, the smallest unit.

Read on 21 October 2026, the chain’s parameters capped the active set at 100 validators, and all 100 seats were taken. The minimum commission is 5%. About 14.5 billion CRO was bonded that day, roughly 14.6% of total supply by our calculation.

Cronos EVM, where the apps run

Cronos EVM opened on 8 November 2021 as Cronos Mainnet. It is the chain users meet in wallets and DeFi apps: Solidity contracts, Ethereum tools such as Hardhat and Foundry, and fees paid in CRO. It is built with Ethermint on the Cosmos SDK, and IBC links it to other Cosmos chains.

Its consensus is more closed. The Cronos documentation says it is commonly called proof of authority, a permissioned variant of proof of stake in which a known group of validators produces blocks. The project gives a block time of 0.5 seconds and final settlement in 500 milliseconds. We found no published count of the EVM chain’s validators.

Cronos zkEVM, shutting down in June 2027

A third chain, Cronos zkEVM, was a layer 2 launched with Matter Labs. On 3 June 2026 Cronos Labs announced the end of this alpha network. Bridge deposits are off. Withdrawals stay open until 3 June 2027 at 03:00 UTC; after that, assets left on it cannot be recovered. The team said the chain never reached critical mass in developer activity, deposits or users.

From card company token to chain coin: CRO’s history

The row marked as reported rests on press accounts we could not check against a primary document.

CRO supply: 70 billion burned in 2021, re-created in 2025

CRO has a hard cap of 100 billion coins, written into the chain’s inflation module. On 21 October 2026 the chain reported a total supply of about 98.99 billion CRO. Circulating supply is calculated differently by each aggregator; the data box on this page shows a live figure.

The 2021 burn

In February 2021 Crypto.com announced a burn of 70 billion CRO: 59.6 billion at once and 10.4 billion month by month as they left lockup, CoinDesk reported. Cointelegraph later reported that the original blog post announcing the burn had been deleted.

Proposal 29: a late swing re-created 70 billion CRO

Four years later the coins came back. Proposal 29, posted on 3 March 2025 and voted until 17 March, put 70 billion CRO into a Cronos Strategic Reserve escrow wallet and took supply back to the cap. Its stated uses were US crypto initiatives, traditional finance projects such as seeding a CRO ETF, and AI and ecosystem grants. It also cut maximum inflation from 3.7% to 1%.

The proposal spent most of the vote losing. On 10 March almost 78% of validator votes were against, CoinDesk reported. Then 3.35 billion CRO voted in the final moments, according to The Block, and the on-chain tally closed at about 62% yes, 17.6% no and 20.1% abstain. CoinDesk named Electron, Antares and Minotaur IV among the validators that piled in late, with about 3.2 billion CRO between them. The Block wrote that Crypto.com was suspected of controlling them.

The backlash was loud. Accusing the company of reissuing coins it had burned “forever”, the on-chain investigator ZachXBT wrote on X that “CRO is no different from a scam”, Cointelegraph reported on 25 March 2025. Crypto.com chief executive Kris Marszalek defended the plan in an online Q&A: “There’s a need for an aggressive investment to win.”

About 1.167 billion CRO a month until 2030

The proposal speaks of a five-year lockup with linear monthly vesting. Its technical section is more precise: vesting starts at the version 5 upgrade, which landed on 18 March 2025, and ends five years later, with about 1.167 billion CRO vesting every 2,628,000 seconds, or roughly 30.4 days.

CryptoTicker reported a tranche of about 1.17 billion CRO overnight into 17 October 2026, all of it to the Strategic Reserve rather than to a team or early backers. Tokenomist lists the next release for 16 November 2026 and the schedule running into 2030.

How much of the reserve has been spent, and on what, is not public, and we could not read the vesting account on chain. Nor have we found an explanation for why total supply sits 1.01 billion under the cap when documented burns add up to 428 million. A release takes coins out of lockup. It is not a sale.

Shrinking inflation and the October 2026 burns

Version 7, approved on 19 May 2026, pinned base inflation at 1% and cut it by 6.8% a month, toward zero. The live rate on 21 October 2026 was 0.703%. Without the decay, the proposal warned, issuance would have breached the cap by October 2027.

Burns are back, on a small scale. Four burns of 50 million CRO from the community pool came before proposal 36, passed on 3 October 2026, which burns 228 million more and brings the total to 428 million. Proposal 37 passed the same day without a single no vote. It commits all revenue from Ult and Cronos Launch to buying CRO on the open market and burning it, monthly and on chain, with every transaction hash published. The vote changes no chain parameter, the buy-and-burn contract was still in development, and we found no published revenue figure for either app.

Proposal 37 also commits the Strategic Reserve to topping up staking rewards as emissions decay. A single monthly tranche is more than twice the 428 million CRO burned from the community pool.

CRO staking: 28 days to unbond, tiers that lock for up to four years

Staking CRO on the POS chain follows the Cosmos pattern. A holder delegates to one of the 100 validators, collects a share of rewards after commission and can lose part of the stake if that validator is slashed. Getting coins back takes 28 days of unbonding.

Version 7 added optional tiers. Commit to a one, two or four-year exit notice and the bonus is 2, 4 or 7 points over a base the documentation puts at about 3% a year. Governance sets those numbers and can change them. Each tier needs at least 100 CRO, keeps its voting power and stays exposed to slashing. Rewards have to be claimed. Leaving means triggering the exit, waiting out the commitment, then exiting at once or through the 28-day unbonding. Validator commission is taken from base rewards only, not from the tier bonus.

What CRO is used for in October 2026

On both chains CRO pays fees, and staked CRO carries the votes on upgrades, burns and the reserve. Most other uses run through Crypto.com and Cronos Labs.

Since 6 November 2024 the Crypto.com app has grouped its perks under Level Up, with four plans: Basic, Plus, Pro and Private. Above Basic, a customer either pays a subscription or locks or stakes CRO, not both. CRO staked this way goes on chain through third-party validators, with a 365-day holding period and slashing risk. Crypto.com says its reward rates are estimates and not guaranteed, and it has cut some of them: for legacy lockups, the Pro rate fell from 4% to 3% on 10 September 2026.

Ult, live since 17 September 2026 and formerly Crypto.com’s Onchain Wallet, is a self-custody trading app with spot crypto, perpetual futures on crypto, US stocks and commodities, and sports predictions; spot stock tokens sit on its “later” list. Markets on offer vary by jurisdiction. Cronos Launch, opened two days earlier, has no token of its own. New tokens trade on a bonding curve, and every fee buys CRO to burn.

On Cronos EVM, DefiLlama ranks the VVS Finance exchange as the largest protocol, ahead of Crypto.com Liquid Staking, Tectonic, Veno, Moonlander and Fulcrom. On 14 September 2026 Cronos Labs said it would build Ult, keep supporting Cronos Launch and VVS Finance, and sunset its other projects over the coming months.

Trump Media and the CRO ETFs: the treasury is gone, one filing waits

On 26 August 2025 Trump Media, Crypto.com and the blank-cheque company Yorkville Acquisition agreed to form Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, with a treasury of at least $6.42 billion: $1 billion in CRO, $420 million in cash and warrants and a $5 billion credit line from a Yorkville affiliate. Yorkville planned a Nasdaq listing as MCGA, and the company would run a Cronos validator. Trump Media bought $105 million of CRO in September 2025, CoinDesk reported.

On 7 August 2026 the partners called the deal off, citing market conditions and shifting business priorities. They also dropped a plan for Crypto.com to service some planned Yorkville America ETFs. Trump Media’s interim chief executive, Kevin McGurn, told Axios the company was refocusing on media and a proposed merger with fusion company TAE.

The Trump-linked ETF went next. The Truth Social Cronos Yield Maximizer ETF, filed on 13 February 2026 and later listed as the Yorkville America Cronos Yield Maximizer ETF, was withdrawn on 13 August. The trust told the SEC: “No securities of the Fund have been sold in connection with the offering.”

One US filing remains: the Canary Staked CRO ETF, first filed on 30 May 2025 and amended in January and May 2026. The May 2026 amendment on SEC EDGAR names Nasdaq but leaves the ticker and the fee blank. Foris DAX Trust Company, trading as Crypto.com Custody Trust Company, would hold the coins, and its affiliate Foris DAX Inc. would stake them. The sponsor plans to stake all of the trust’s CRO except what it keeps back for redemptions and expenses. As of 21 October 2026 EDGAR showed no newer filing and the fund was not trading.

The Tectonic exploit and the two hours Cronos erased

On 30 August 2026 an attacker pushed TONIC, the token of the Tectonic lending protocol, up roughly 100-fold in minutes against thin trading liquidity, then borrowed $120.4 million against it across nine markets. Validators halted Cronos EVM at block 90,907,150 and rewound it to block 90,896,188, erasing 10,961 blocks, or 1 hour 54 minutes of history. Blocks resumed about 11 hours after the attack.

About $111.2 million was restored. “The $9.19 million that left Cronos before the halt has not been recovered and is beyond the restoration’s reach,” the team said in its post-mortem, as reported by The Block. Cronos said it had weighed “the finality users expect from a chain against the funds at risk”, CoinDesk reported.

The rewind also voided transactions by users who had nothing to do with the attack. CoinDesk noted that the 100-validator cap makes such a coordinated halt possible, and recalled that Flow dropped a proposed rollback in December 2025 over objections that rewriting history undermines decentralisation.

Risks: concentrated votes, one company and a supply that can be rewritten

The re-issuance passed only after a late swing by a handful of large validators. Claims that Crypto.com controls most of the voting power come from GitHub users, who put it at up to 70%, and from unnamed sources cited by Unchained, who said 70% to 80%, according to Cointelegraph. We have not verified them. Burned coins have been re-created once; a later vote could rewrite the cap, the burns or the reserve.

Much of the network leans on one group: Crypto.com affiliates would custody and stake the only pending US ETF, Crypto.com runs Level Up, and Cronos Labs builds Ult. Plans around the coin also change fast, as the cancelled treasury and the closing zkEVM show.

Reserve vesting keeps adding unlocked coins until about 2030, at a pace far above the burns. Crypto.com said on 27 March 2025 that the SEC had closed its investigation into the company with no enforcement action.

Where to buy CRO: six exchanges we reviewed

On 21 October 2026, six exchanges reviewed by Coindaro had live CRO markets. Crypto.com, the issuer, trades it against the dollar, USDT, bitcoin and PYUSD. Kraken offers CRO in dollars and euros, Coinbase in dollars, OKX against USDT and Bitvavo in euros, and Bitpanda sells it too. Binance, Bybit and Gemini had no CRO market, and Bitget’s pair was halted.

Crypto.com announced on 27 January 2025 that its Maltese entity, Foris DAX MT Limited, had received a MiCA authorisation from the Malta Financial Services Authority; it passported the licence across the European Economic Area on 12 February 2025. Availability still depends on the country. Before withdrawing, check the network: CRO on Ethereum, on Cronos EVM and on the POS chain are different forms, and coins sent on the wrong one can be hard to recover.

The next date on the supply calendar is 16 November 2026, when Tokenomist expects another reserve tranche.