Cronos Labs, the company responsible for managing the Cronos EVM and Cronos zkEVM networks, has just announced a strategic partnership with LayerZero.
The integration will allow the blockchains related to the Crypto.com exchange to navigate interoperably among over 115 supported chains.
The cross-chain protocol is already active, but the features for users will be activated in the coming weeks.
Let’s see all the details below.
The LayerZero interoperability protocol is active on the Cronos EVM and Cronos zkEVM chains
Cronos Labs has just revealed to its community an important strategic collaboration with the decentralized protocol LayerZero.
The partnership opens the doors of interoperability to the Cronos EVM and Cronos zkEVM blockchains, currently tied only to the Ethereum execution environment.
In particular, the implementation of LayerZero on the two networks (both in mainnet and testnet) allows to connect Cronos users with approximately 115 supported chains.
Among these is also the presence of blockchain like Solana, and various level 1 and level 2 solutions, such as to promote greater aggregated liquidity.
Until today, Cronos EVM, level 1 mainnet, was able to communicate with the chains of the Cosmos ecosystem via IBC and with those compatible with Ethereum.
Instead, Cronos zkEVM, level 2 rollup network, was capable of moving between the native Ethereum bridge and another 10 Elastic Chains of the same type.
With the integration of LayerZero everything changes, adding a myriad of different cross-chain connections, usable with low-cost scalability.
Developers can now create new successful interoperable applications, capable of offering their flexible services to Cronos users, seizing various opportunities in the vast blockchain world.
More specifically, the main advantage concerns the fact that with such a cross-chain coverage, one can tap into a unified liquidity solving the problem of fragmentation.
On the subject of the issue, Ken Timsit, CEO of Cronos Labs, intervened and stated at the press conference that:
“Cross-chain interoperability has been one of the main priorities of the Cronos project since its inception. Given the significant security and liquidity challenges associated with the fragmentation of the cryptocurrency sector, Cronos Labs is working on this priority with caution and determination. By 2025, we expect much greater connectivity between cryptographic projects and traditional finance. The integration with LayerZero enables this.”
New cross-chain features coming for Cronos users
Currently, the LayerZero protocol is already active on the two Cronos chains, however, many features have not yet been added by the developers.
It is estimated that in the coming weeks the Cronos team will announce new cross-chain interoperability features.
In particular, new cross-chain bridging solutions will likely be integrated on the project’s official bridge platforms, namely cronos.org/bridge for Cronos EVM and zkevm.cronos.org/bridge for Cronos zkEVM.
This will definitely include new means to move CRO and zkCRO resources to other networks, including Solana.
Then in addition to bridging, Cronos Labs wants to focus on the development of new decentralized applications capable of leveraging the potential of LayerZero.
On the other hand, for the success of a decentralized ecosystem, it is essential that the dApps built on it are able to offer interesting services capable of attracting new users from other cryptographic realities.
In detail, the inclusion of use cases such as: cross-chain prediction markets, tokenization of RWA, trading of synthetic assets, lending protocols, restaking, and other typical DeFi products is expected.
Currently, the presence of Cronos in the world of blockchain applications seems underwhelming compared to the rest of the industry.
The Cronos EVM network struggles to regain the ground lost in recent years, remaining at a TVL of 488 million dollars.
On the contrary, Cronos zkEVM seems to be growing compared to the past months, but it is traveling at a TVL of only $25 million.
Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero, is confident that this integration can create the foundations for a strong expansion, especially in the zkEVM sector.
These are his words:
“Cronos zkEVM is one of the first elastic chains towards which LayerZero is expanding, which is exciting, as the central point of interoperability is connecting different types of chains. I am excited to see what has been built here!”.
Some on-chain data from the LayerZero protocol
The integration of Cronos represents just the latest example of the ongoing aggregation activity by LayerZero.
The interoperability protocol, born in March 2022, boasts to date more than 115 destination chains available.
In total since its inception, it has hosted 5.6 million users for 111 million cross-chain transactions, enabling the transfer of over 41.75 billion dollars (data from Dune).
This project literally exploded from March 2023 onwards, following the incentives to the community for the airdrop of the ZRO token.
Many farmers have used the protocol massively with the sole purpose of qualifying for the distribution of ZRO, which now capitalizes 413 million dollars.
From May 2024, the number of daily transactions has plummeted to the downside by over 10 times, highlighting how much of the previous activity was “artificially inflated.”
To give an idea at the top LayerZero counted about 500,000 daily tx while today it marks just 6,000.
Very curious to observe also how the focus of the protocol users has shifted around the various blockchains it supports.
Ethereum, for example, seems to have a larger market share now that the number of tx has collapsed, rather than during the period of maximum expansion of LayerZero.
For the layer-2 Optimism and Arbitrum, the interest has been growing, even though the number of transactions involving them has collapsed.
Polygon, Fantom and Avalanche, Celo and Gnosis have lost positive traction and have been increasingly less used by users, reflecting their low on-chain engagement
BNB Chain has also left part of the large market shares it had throughout 2023 on the table, even though it is still a protagonist.
Base has instead seen its numbers increase, given its expansion in 2024.
