Cronos has announced the completion of a major performance upgrade to the Cronos EVM mainnet, delivering up to 10x reduction in block time and pushing the network into the sub-second era. This enhancement significantly improves network responsiveness and throughput, supporting the next generation of high-performance decentralized applications.
As of 3 July 2025, the network upgrade will go live on mainnet, bringing Cronos EVM’s average block interval from approximately 5.6 seconds down to under one second. This achievement reinforces its position as one of the most compatible, low-latency and scalable Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains. With its instant finality, Cronos now ranks among the world’s 10 fastest blockchains for on-chain finality, opening the door to real-time DeFi, AI and payments.
This leap in speed is enabled by recent scalability innovations, including BlockSTM, the parallel execution engine introduced in the Pallene upgrade, which allows multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously within each block. The latest block time optimization complements this by increasing block production frequency, resulting in faster finality and smoother user interactions.
Mirko Zhao, Cronos Labs Lead and Head of Product & Engineering commented, “By unlocking sub-second performance, we’re not just making the network faster — we’re enabling a new class of ultra-fast blockchain applications. This upgrade reinforces our long-term commitment to developer experience and performance at scale.”
This upgrade follows Cronos’ broader roadmap focused on performance, affordability and AI agent readiness. Prior to this upgrade, Cronos implemented a 10x base gas fee reduction in June, making the network more accessible to both users and developers.
The network has also broken new ground in real-world adoption. In partnership with Crypto.com, it became the first blockchain to support direct funding of a prepaid card with crypto. A supporting feature, Auto-Harvest, automates the process of converting DeFi rewards into fiat top-ups, bridging the gap between on-chain activity and everyday payments.
About Cronos
Cronos is a leading blockchain ecosystem that has partnered with Crypto.com and more than 500 application developers and contributors representing an addressable user base of more than a hundred million people around the world. Cronos’ mission is to make it easy and safe for the next billion crypto users to adopt self-custody in Web3, with a focus on Decentralized Finance and Gaming.
The Cronos universe encompasses 3 chains: Cronos EVM, the leading Ethereum-compatible blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK; Cronos POS, a leading Cosmos chain for payments and NFTs; and Cronos zkEVM, a new high performance layer 2 network secured by Ethereum.
Cronos ranks among the top 15 blockchain ecosystems, encompassing more than 6 billion dollars of user assets. Since inception, it has securely settled more than 100 million transactions.
Transaction fees are paid in Cronos ($CRO), a blue chip cryptocurrency.
Cronos is supported by Cronos Labs, a Web3 start-up accelerator focused on DeFi, GameFi and the development of the Cronos ecosystem.
For more information, visit https://cronos.org or follow @cronos_chain on X
