Cronos Labs has announced the alpha mainnet launch of the Cronos zkEVM, marking the first chain to go live using the ZKsync tech stack alongside the Era chain.
Cronos zkEVM is a result of a collaboration between Cronos Labs, Matter Labs (a contributor to ZKsync), Crypto.com and a collection of dapp partners. The network has been in testnet since December 2023.
The new chain joins the existing Cronos POS and Cronos EVM blockchains, which collectively manage over $6 billion in user assets, according to Cronos Labs.
The POS chain was the first, launched in 2021 as a Cosmos appchain developed in partnership with the Crypto.com exchange. The second was an EVM-compatible chain, which came online in 2022, also using the Cosmos SDK.
In launching the zkEVM, Cronos is expanding its ecosystem into the zk rollup space of Ethereum layer-2 networks.
Read more: Cronos broadens scaling roadmap from Cosmos to Ethereum
Native account abstraction capabilities allow users to pay transaction fees in a variety of tokens, and one of the novel features of the Cronos zkEVM is its use of zkCRO, a liquid-staked version of CRO, as its primary gas token.
Ken Timsit from Cronos Labs expressed the team’s commitment to advancing blockchain technology and contributing to open-source projects.
“We would like to help to realize the long term vision of Ethereum on a path towards infinite scalability and mainstream adoption,” Timsit said.
Cronos app developers, such as VVS Finance, Fulcrom Finance and Veno Finance, are committed to deploying on the new chain, and Cronos Labs says at least 20 more are on the way.
As part of the Elastic Chain, the new Cronos chain will have access to the same native Ethereum bridge as ZKsync Era.
ZKsync’s June protocol upgrade made it possible for the Cronos zkEVM to join the Elastic Chain according to Anthony Rose, Matter Labs’ chief technology officer.
“‘Shared bridge’ is actually a bit of a clumsy name. This isn’t just a bridge, this is a series of smart contracts on Ethereum that supports all of the chains that will be deployed into the network,” Rose told Blockworks.
Because the assets are stored together “you can do protocol level transfers between ZK chains, without needing [a layer-1 transaction] to update balances, etc.” he said.
Read more: ZKsync Elastic Chain rebrand seeks to carve out scaling niche
In an effort to bootstrap usage, Cronos is promoting zkCRO as a “triple yield” opportunity, factoring in native staking yield, plus any yields from DeFi dapps, as well as ZK token incentives allocated to the project following the ZKsync airdrop.
Cronos piggybacks on the Maker DAI Savings Rate, to offer a yield-bearing vUSD stablecoin, minted from assets bridged to the Cronos zkEVM. Unlike sDAI, which increases in value over time, vUSD will be pegged to DAI 1:1 with the yield portion claimable from the Veno Finance dapp, according to its documentation.
Read more: New stablecoins seek payments niche on new chains
The alpha phase of Cronos zkEVM is expected to last until September 2024. Rose analogizes the new chain to the second of two computers connected on a single network.
“As more ZK chains are deployed, they’ll be joining these, which is the horizontal scalability we’ve talked about,” he said.
