Why Build & Grow on Cronos?

During the past week at the Permissionless conference and then at the Activate Build hackathon, I spent the majority of my time convincing DeFi and GameFi developers to choose Cronos as their home.

Many founders came to us on the heels of the announcement that Cronos has reached #7 position among all chains in total value locked.

I thought it could be helpful to recap some of the points that resonated the most with both new and experienced founders.

#1 Cronos is #crofam

Cronos is one of the few chains that defines itself, first and foremost, by its user community. As an open-source layer 1 technology and as a public blockchain network, Cronos is backed by Crypto.com and Crypto.org.

Cronos will soon reach 1 million users on Cronos but the addressable user base is much larger and consists of more than 50 million Crypto.com users, Crypto.org stakers, and $CRO holders on 3 networks (Cronos, Crypto.org and Ethereum). We call this addressable ecosystem #crofam, the Cronos family. This community existed before Cronos went live in November 2021 because, obviously, Crypto.com has been around for a while and is one of the world’s most prominent and trusted crypto exchanges. It’s alive and well, and it’s growing fast.

If there is one thing that I have learned from watching the growth of Ethereum over the years, it is that founders eventually gravitate towards networks where they can find the end-users, even though Ethereum has historically not been the place where you could get the largest grants and incentives. User acquisition is the single greatest headache and expense for a founder.

While the Cronos addressable user base is huge, the supply of DeFi and GameFi Dapps is comparatively small, as it stands at around 250 applications today. If you are a talented builder and your team knows how to ship fast, you can be an early mover on Cronos and your project will achieve tremendous visibility very quickly. MM Finance is an example of independent project that managed to go from zero to more than 1 billion USD total value locked in just a few weeks.

The technology may evolve, but the user community is our unfair competitive advantage. #crofam will still be around in 20 years.

#2 Large appetite for DeFi and GameFi

The #crofam user base is strongly engaged. On average, every unique Cronos wallet transacts once every 2 days.

At Cronos Labs we talk with users and collect their feedback every day, and here is what we have learned:

• Cronos users are retail crypto and DeFi traders and/or gamers.
• They are are evenly distributed across the American continent, EMEA (Europe / Middle East / Africa) and APAC (Asia / Pacific).
• They are early adopters, even though for the most part they are not highly technical. They are always ready to give the new Dapp a try. (So please, be considerate and enforce high security standards).
• They want retail DeFi applications with clear value propositions and simple user experiences.
• They want more games, not just to earn, but also to have a great time.

The right DeFi and GameFi dapps can reach tens of thousands of daily active users very quickly, and grow from there. Give it a try.

#3 Cronos technology and tools are supported by hundreds of thousands of developers

Cronos is EVM (Ethereum) compatible.

Ethereum may not objectively be the best technology for everything, but it has the largest developer community by far. There are probably close to 1 million people who are developing Ethereum-based applications, libraries, infrastructure and tools globally, compared with thousands or tens of thousands working on other blockchain technologies.

These libraries and tools can be leveraged on Cronos. This is a huge deal because wallets, node infrastructure providers, indexers, smart contract standards and SDKs are orders of magnitude better than what a new blockchain ecosystem could develop from scratch. And of course, the talent base exists already.

Some of the developer tools that you can use on Cronos include: Truffle, Ganache, Hardhat, OpenZeppelin, MetaMask, Crypto .com DeFi Wallet, Trust Wallet, Covalent, Moralis, The Graph, Blockdaemon, Chainalysis, Gnosis Safe (soon), and many others.

Additionally, Cronos is built on the Cosmos SDK, another proven blockchain technology that is supported by a large and vibrant developer community.

As a founder on Cronos, you can access great technology that is here to stay, on a chain that is also here to stay. Cronos transaction fees are cheaper than on Ethereum mainnet, but they are not insignificant either because we care about building a chain that is sustainable in the long run and is generating enough fees to reward its validators.

#4 Easy on-ramp into any of the world’s top 50 tokens

Most of the world’s top 50 tokens have a wrapped version on Cronos.

Partly this is because of the way that Crypto.com is supporting Cronos: every week, Crypto.com grows the list of tokens supported for withdrawal of funds from the Crypto.com app to Cronos. Users can link their Crypto.com account to their self-custodial Crypto.com DeFi Wallet. Once that connection is live, users can buy almost any coin directly from within the self-custodial wallet, in a handful of clicks.

This is also because Cronos supports the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, allowing easy and secure token transfers between Cronos and other chains of the Cosmos SDK and IBC ecosystems.

If you are a founder, you can acquire users by giving them more things to do with the tokens that they already own, as opposed to having to convince them to sell their bags in order to try your Dapp.

#5 Support from Cronos Labs

Cronos Labs is the team that coordinates the development of the Cronos open-source technology and public network, and promotes the development of the Cronos Dapp ecosystem.

Ecosystem development programs include:

• A grant program, which includes technical and marketing support.
• Several (soon to be announced) accelerator programs.
• Tailored partnerships with game developers who are planning to launch their game on Cronos first.

Please contact us at contact@cronoslabs.org if you are a founder who is considering launching a DeFi or GameFi Dapp on Cronos.