The Cronos blockchain was launched on November 8th, 2021, and has been officially in beta status ever since. It has seen some upgrades, including the Draco II Phase 2 update in December which gave Cronos the ability to issue native tokens so that essentially any token on any blockchain could be used on Cronos, and along with it, massive user-growth.
The user-base, or unique wallet addresses, has continued to growth faster and faster and now sits at over 430,000. Daily transactions have also continued to increase in an uptick, and have totalled 14.2m to date, and currently averaging over 150,000 per day. The total locked up in DeFi protocols on Cronos is now over $2 billion, placing it in 9th place amongst all smart contract blockchains. There are now more than 100 unique projects deployed on Cronos.
But…. that’s the current, what about the future?
What’s to Come?
Ken Timsit, a managing partner at Particle B and Cronos team member, recently gave an update on Cronos, and what to expect for 2022. In his update he gave an overview of the statistics Cronos has reached so far in its 3 month lifespan, Cronos scaling plans, a couple mainnet upgrades and their Gravity bridge.
There are so many exciting updates here to unpack so I’ll just jump right into it. For Q1/Q2 Cronos will roll out some big updates that are sure to please everyone, not to mention also officially removing the “beta” tag from its name.
Developer Tools
Crypto.org has kept developers close to heart throughout the entire lifespan of Cronos to date, and the theme looks to continue as they have announced quite a few tools and utilities to bring Cronos on par with other mature smart contract blockchains.
In 2022 developers can look forward to Crypto.org continuing to buildout its validators, add highly reliable commercial RPC endpoints for access to Cronos on-chain data, additional self-custodial mobile wallets that support Cronos, additional analytics platforms, full Chainlink and Band oracle integration to enable Cronos dApps to reach off-chain data, relayer incentives, GameFi SDK’s, more ICS updates and much more.
Database Optimizations and IBC Bridge
Cronos will rollout some database optimizations, along with adding more IBC channels enabling more interoperability between chains and tokens on Cosmos, and even evaluating adding interoperability between non-IBC Cosmos blockchains.
Cronos is currently being utilized at or around 20%-25% on average, but the developers aren’t resting on their laurels, and are already working to significantly increase the blockchains transaction capacity. They believe they can reach a 3x to 6x increase in block capacity in the short to medium term. Additional development is being dedicated to work to improve the Cronos nodes software, increasing their speed and responsiveness.
Gravity Bridge
Gravity Bridge is intended to bridge Ethereum and Cronos so that users will be able to transfer their assets between the two blockchains seamlessly. This is a massive deal, because it gives the entire Ethereum userbase access to and from Cronos and its thriving dApp ecosystem with extremely cheap fees. More information about the Gravity Bridge can be found here.
Flexible Fees
Flexible Fees, is also a really big deal. Cronos by default sets the transactions gas price as 5000 Giga-basecro, regardless of the amount of network congestion. With Flexible Fees, the transaction gas price will be reduced automatically if the network is under 50% utilization, and could be increased to ensure the transaction succeeds in the network is over 50% utilization.
Fear not though, Ken mentions “We do not expect transaction fees to rise due to the implementation of this feature. In fact, we expect that Cronos will gradually become more cost-effective for users.” With the network currently averaging around 25%, this sounds like our fees may be reduced, at least in the near term.
Possible cheaper Cronos transactions? Yes, please.
To read more of what Ken had to say please visit his post by going to https://medium.com/cronos-chain/cronos-chain-journey-so-far-and-2022-roadmap-3475abbe6254.