CRO Unveils the Most Absurd Governance Farce in History with the Arbitrary Creation of 70 Billion Tokens

Good news: The official proposal to destroy 100 million tokens has been made. After waiting for 700 years, the supply will be restored!

Original: Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Crypto.com and its affiliated blockchain Cronos have recently staged one of the most absurd governance farces in blockchain history—70 billion tokens (the current total supply of CRO is 30 billion) were minted out of thin air. Despite strong opposition from retail investors, the community’s voice became a complete joke in the face of the official “veto power.”

Table of Contents

• Cause: Official Proposal to Reissue 70 Billion Tokens
• Progress: Strong Community Opposition, Possible “Vote Rigging” by the Officials
• Climax: The Show is Over!
• Bonus: What True Insult Looks Like!

The incident traces back to March 3rd. On that day, Cronos posted an announcement regarding a bold plan (indeed, a bold one) to reshape the golden era of Cronos and inject significant funding to support the Cronos roadmap (including ETFs) and the ambition of making the U.S. the capital of the cryptocurrency world. To support this plan, Cronos proposed reversing the 70 billion token burn event of February 2021 (note, Cronos’s X announcement didn’t even dare to specify this number) and use this portion to build Cronos’ strategic reserve.

Specifically, Cronos proposed to reissue these 70 billion CRO tokens into the Cronos strategic reserve custodial wallet, restoring the total supply of CRO to the original 100 billion. The newly issued tokens would be locked for 10 years (calculated from the creation date of CRO) and then unlocked linearly on a monthly basis.

Clearly, no matter how much Cronos glorified this proposal, such a massive issuance would inevitably lead to the dilution of CRO’s value, something ordinary token holders could not ignore. According to the Mintscan governance voting record, on the first day after the proposal went to vote, the opposition rate reached 95.7%, effectively showing the community’s strong opposition… however, this didn’t matter at all.

As shown in the image below, with the intervention of a mysterious force, the approval rate (green line) slowly began to reverse the opposition rate (red line)—ignoring the slight rise of the green line at the end for now.

This mysterious force is named as such because, during the majority of the governance period between March 3rd and March 17th, the approval votes consistently led by a faint margin over the opposition votes in a very unnatural manner—it seemed that this mysterious force wanted to maintain the “illusion” of intense debate between opposing sides.

This awkward balance persisted up until the vote’s conclusion. According to Cronos’s governance rules (why even follow this set of rules?), in addition to requiring a certain approval rate, passing a governance proposal also requires a participation rate above the legal threshold of 33.4%. At that time, the participation rate of the vote did not meet this condition. In other words, even if the approval rate was higher, the proposal could not pass.

So, Cronos stopped pretending—at the last moment, about 3.35 billion CRO were directly voted in favor. This is why the green line suddenly spikes at the end of the chart above.

According to disclosures by UnChained, three independent sources revealed that Crypto.com and Cronos actually controlled 70-80% of the voting power. The reason the votes had once remained balanced was because only two validator nodes controlled by Crypto.com, Starship and Falcon Heavy, had taken action, while at the last moment, three other validator nodes—Electron, Antares, and Minotaur IV—joined the fray.

As clearly seen in the image below, the discrepancy in voting power between the officials and retail investors is staggering.

In the end, with the participation of the official powers, the proposal passed “safely,” and 70 billion CRO will be minted and await circulation.

In response to this absurd governance farce, many CRO holders expressed extreme disappointment, with some even stating that this was an insult to the community.

Is this really an insult? Cronos clearly doesn’t think so. After the proposal passed, Cronos loudly announced another proposal on X, suggesting the destruction of 50 million CRO—only 0.07% of the 70 billion. Now that’s a real insult!

According to the historical burn records posted by Cronos, two burn sessions will be carried out each year, with 50 million CRO burned per session, totaling 100 million CRO per year.

Some community members joked, “It looks like it will only take about 1,400 burn sessions to eliminate these 70 billion CRO. So we just need to wait another 700 years, and the supply will be restored to its current level.”

That’s Cronos for you, perhaps this is the mentality of creating a “century-old enterprise.”

This article is reprinted with permission from Odaily Planet Daily.