What is the Chronos blockchain

The Cronos (CRO) project is a project created by the renowned exchange Crypto.com in order to initially create an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum network to generate a utility token with special access to its services.

SHowever, this initial goal has morphed to the point where Cronos is now an open source, decentralized blockchain on top of which the native Cronos token also runs. This blockchain seeks to promote the development of solutions that help accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrencies as a means to increase personal control over money, safeguard user data and protect their identities.

Origin of Chronos

The history of Crypto.com and the token begins with the company Monaco Technology GmbH. This company decided to launch the Monaco Coin (MCO) token. This was the beginning of the Crypto.com exchange, which in November 2018, was renamed from Monaco Technology GmbH, to become the current Crypto.com. In addition, he announced the following:

1. The launch of its own blockchain, maintained by Crypto.org, as an independent organization to support the project.
2. The renaming of MCO to CRO, in order to give it better brand recognition.

MCO was already a live project on the Ethereum network using the ERC-20 token, so with this announcement it was just renamed. The idea is that MCO holdings would be a starting point for new CRO hodlers once the network went live, but the launch of the new blockchain was a clean slate, something big that would take more than three years of work. development to Crypto.com get.

Thus, the Cronos Chain aims to create a chain compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) with added support for IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communications) networks based on the Cosmos SDK. In other words: it is compatible with the Ethereum and Cosmos-based ecosystems, making it easy to port Ethereum smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps).

This functionality would give Cronos the native ability to function as a bridge between both ecosystems, allowing them to communicate natively using Cronos as an intermediary. To achieve this, Cronos would make use of the capabilities of the Cosmos SDK to build its network around Cosmos while maintaining full compatibility with Ethereum and its EVM.

Finally, on November 8, 2021, the Cronos network began its operation with the validation of its first block, using the technological stack that Cosmos SDK made available to this network.

In all of this, the CRO token is instrumental in driving the Cronos Chain ecosystem. At the same time, Cronos Chain developers achieved:

1. Great compatibility with the EVM. This allowed developers to easily port their Solidity-based Ethereum DApps to the Cronos platform without making significant changes.
2. EVM CRO Fund. Cronos Labs, a subsidiary of Crypto.org launched a $100 million fund in May 2021 to support developers creating EVM DApps on the Cronos Chain. Projects that successfully apply and qualify for the grant can earn up to $XNUMX million each.
3. Maintain a large user base. Being part of the broader ecosystem of Crypto.com Cronos gives projects access to at least 10 million potential adopters of their solutions and apps.
4. It offers high scalability thanks to the use of Cosmos technology and its Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus protocol, based on Tendermint.
5. Cronos source code is publicly available so that interested users can audit and contribute to its improvement.

How does Chronos work?

Cronos Chain is a development based on Ethermint, a high performance and scalable blockchain framework that is fully compatible and interoperable with Ethereum and is part of the Cosmos ecosystem (although the main development is now in the hands of Tharsis).

Thanks to this, Cronos is able to implement all the necessary support so that developers can access all the desirable features of Ethereum, while taking advantage of the scalability and associated lower costs of Cosmos. At the same time, this offers the ability to:

1. Have full compatibility with Ethereum Web3. This means that smart contracts and wallets from the Ethereum network can be easily imported into Cronos.
2. Interoperability within the IBC ecosystem, allowing connecting to other chains that are part of Cosmos.
3. Fast transaction processing speeds due to the use of staking based on the Tendermint Core consensus engine.
4. Ease of code maintainability when using the Ethereum-based GETH (Go Ethereum) code base.
5. The Cronos network is based on the Tendermint Core Proof of Stake (PoS) engine to achieve consensus. PoS allows validators to stake a portion of their assets into a smart contract to incentivize good behavior while validating transactions.

The benefit of PoS is that it is much more scalable than Proof of Work (PoW) used by various established networks such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash, among others.

By adopting the Ethermint framework, Cronos embraces the best of both worlds from the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems. That is, DApps compatible with EVM and cross-chain compatibility with networks based on Cosmos SDK. Scalability is also a big draw to attract DApp developers on the Ethereum network to port their apps to Cronos.

Tokenomics

CRO is the utility token of the Cronos Chain, but at the same time it is integrated into the centralized exchange Crypto.com. In fact, Crypto.com uses CRO in all aspects of its ecosystem, including:

1. Payments: Crypto.com Pay, the Crypto.org chain and the Visa card.
2. Trading: Crypto.com App & Exchange.
3. Financial Services: Crypto.com Earn, Crypto.com Credit, and Crypto.com DeFi Swap.

This means that CRO is widely used in the Crypto.com ecosystem and continues to grow in utility by being a native token on Cronos.

Within the blockchain, CRO is used as a utility token for the payment of commissions and other interaction operations within the network. Among the data of this token we can mention:

• Token Symbol: CRO
• Token Name: Crypto.org Coin
• Blockchain: Chronos
• Token type: Utility and Government
• Supply Total: 30.263.013.692 CRO
• Outstanding: 25,26 billion CRO

Initially, the intended supply for Cronos was 100 billion tokens, but in February 2021 Crypto.com decided to burn almost 70 billion tokens, reducing the supply to its current point.

Governance within Cronos

Being an open source blockchain, Cronos allows all CRO token holders to participate in its governance. Anyone can make a proposal, fund it, and vote for it and others to ensure its adoption. Here is the eight-stage process for approving proposals within the network:

1. conception of the idea
2. Drafting of the proposal;
3. Collection of opinions from the community;
4. Proposal review;
5. Send to the main network;
6. Deposit 20.000 CRO tokens to activate the voting process;
7. Voting of the active proposals in the main network;
8. Adoption or rejection of the proposal depending on the results of the vote.

How to add Cronos network to Metamask?

Adding support to Cronos within Metamask is quite simple, for this we can use the website of chain list and look for the Cronos option.

At this point, just go to the search engine and there we can see the option to add the Cronos Mainnet (in Beta state). To add the new network, you just have to use the “Add to Metamask” button and accept the interaction:

And with that, we have added the Cronos network to our Metamask wallet. To test the functionality, just go to one of the DApps that are deployed on the Cronos network. To do this, just go to the section «Ecosystem» from the official Cronos website and see the number of projects that have been deployed in this network.

For example, if we use the Cronos Bridge DApp, we can see the following with our Metamask wallet:

Upon entering the DApp, just click on “Connect Wallet” and we begin the connection process:

By accepting the interaction, it will only take a few seconds until the network is connected to our wallet and we can use the DApp without major problems.

Thanks to this, our Metamask wallet opens the doors to this network with very high speed and low commissions, allowing us to use the full potential of this network and its ever-increasing number of available DApps, among which are applications within this blockchain. .