Is Cronos chain dead
Good morning/evening
After reading an interesting post by Betasyndicate.eth about Crypto dot com, you can see the full article here cryptocom-can-kiss-my in my comment I made a fleeting comment about the Cronos chain and does anyone actually use it, but then it was one of those niggling topics that I just had to find out about.
(In my early crypto days, I had one of their cards but it never even worked lol, so never used the exchange either. Good job by the sound of it. Does anyone even use the Cronos chain? I have never even looked at it, may do when I am bored! This was my comment
Reply - About 4 years ago, I launched SCORE with Cannacoin on CRO, the developer wanted to use it for its social appeal, and possibilities of listings and what not. I could have argued but it was what it was and I rolled with it. I already had issues with Crypto.com’s BS, but business is business. Today, I’m wholeheartedly working with a better chain for the project. CRO is just too much like a rip off of Ethereum and not as widely accepted with users. Ethereum is going to be a beast with lower fees.)
It was an interesting article and well worth a read, there are some heated comments, I have myself on many occasions wanted to use colourful language when writing about crypto, and sometimes frustration can get the better of us, but if you can see past that the author is spot on about what he is saying.
I have the app and have been tapping on that collect diamond for as long as I can remember, probably all the years I have been in crypto and for most of that time the token value in USD has been arouund $0.10 or below with the odd spike, now I have missed my chance to sell on previous spikes so I had been ready and waiting to sell all the CRO I had earned. Lo and behold we have the recent upwards movement of the CRO token so I swapped it into USDC, then as usual it went up some more........But hey it was free and then I left the USDC there and went away for a short break in the mountains, when I came back to reality I thought that as I don't use Cronos chain I should move my USDC, so I looked at my options, Metamask or Phantom would be my preferred choices, after 20 minutes of looking at my options and not wanting to bridge, I eventually swapped my CRO to SOL and sent it to Phantom wallet. The time for the transaction to go through was actually really quick, I expected it to be a slow confirmation so I was wrong there but as for the fee, as it is a CEX I was expecting it to be $1.00 or so but it was actually closer to $3! for just $70 of SOL. (You get so spoiled when using Solana for most of your trades $3.00 on that chain gives me enough to cover fees for months).
I also have an actual Crypto dot com card, I have had it for years and it has never worked, support was appauling and it is still sat in the house somewhere probably expired by now which in all honesty put me off using the chain in the first place.
So following on from my experience, I thought I would take a look at usage and what there actually is on the Cronos chain.
DeFi & Finance
VVS Finance, A Cronos DEX
MM Finance or MMF, Another DEX with yeild farming
Tectonic, Money market for borrow/lend
Ferro, An AMM/DEX
Argo Finance, Liquid staking for CRO
NFTs, Gaming, & GameFi / Metaverse
Ebisu's Bay, NFT marketplace and minting
Ballies, A sport themed mobile gaming platform that started with NFTs
Marbleverse, P2E games
Kingdom Karnage, Trading card game
Ryoshi Tales, A recource management game
Infrastructure / Tools / Data / Ecosystem Support
Footprint Network, Tools to look at blockchain data
Chainstack, Provides RPC endpoints, node and infrastructure support
Gelato Network, Automation for smart contract calls and bots
Revenue & Fees
How Cronos earns
Transaction (gas) fees, When users send transactions or use smart contracts, they pay gas (in CRO). These fees go to validators, block producers, etc., and are part of chain revenue. The figures from DefiLlama show chain fees of a few thousand USD/day.
App fees or protocol fees, Some protocols (DEXs, lending, etc.) charge fees, which generate revenue for the protocol and sometimes for token holders. DefiLlama shows app-revenue numbers (in tens of thousands USD).
Bridging / cross-chain inflows, When tokens are bridged in/out, there may be fees or incentives.
Stats from DeFi Llama.
Cronos TVL 12 months
Compared to a random selection
Solana $9.45 Billion
BNB Smartchain $5.61 Billion
Arbitrum 1 $2.93 Billion
Optimism $800 Million
Avalanche $900 Million
(Approx, data from DeFi Llama)
Cronos daily active addresses 12 months, Solana is in the millions just for context.
Cronos daily fees revenue earned 12 months
Interesting that the daily users are dropping off a cliff, but the revenue is going up.
- Are there one or a few very large transactions (Whales)?
- Did the CRO price spike relative to USD?
- Are DEX volumes or derivatives/perps volumes spiking?
- Bot/MEV activity, flash arbitrage can create a lot of fees with few addresses.
Developer activity was something else I thought about and it does look like there is some activity on Cronos, including upgrades. The network has improved its block speed from 5 seconds to 1 second. They have reduced memory usage for full nodes to lower costs and has improved cross chain data infrastructure making integrations easier (The Graph). There is also the 'Circuit breaker' to pause operations in an emergency.....Not so sure I like that one! All this activity sounds good and Devs are working on new Dapps, but when you compare the activity to that of Solana (Yes it is my go to chain) it is not a great amount really.
Data from Git Hub.
So if I was researching for a possible investment into this chain, or token then it would be a firm NO and that is without getting into the reviews on Reddit, none of which I found to be complimentary. As the few dollars I had in CRO were free, then that is fine but I would not actually use it or buy into it.
What are your thoughts? Do you use the Cronos chain? Do you or would you hold CRO? I have plans to sell almost all of my ALTs if and when ALT season lasts for more than a day, the CRO I had is now sold and although I may still do that daily diamond tap, it will probably be another 4 years before I have to use Cronos chain again to sell and withdraw any free CRO I may have.
As always, thanks for reading and please feel free to comment.
https://defillama.com/
https://github.com/
