Cronos EVM Achieves 10x Block Time Reduction, Enters Sub-Second Era

Cronos has successfully completed a significant performance upgrade to its Cronos EVM mainnet, achieving a remarkable reduction in block time by up to 10 times. This upgrade has pushed the network into the sub-second era, enhancing its responsiveness and throughput. The network upgrade, which went live on 3 July 2025, has reduced Cronos EVM’s average block interval from approximately 5.6 seconds to under one second. This advancement solidifies Cronos' position as one of the most compatible, low-latency, and scalable Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains, with instant finality placing it among the world’s 10 fastest blockchains for on-chain finality. This speed enhancement opens new possibilities for real-time decentralized finance (DeFi), artificial intelligence (AI), and payment applications.

The achievement is attributed to recent scalability innovations, including BlockSTM, a parallel execution engine introduced in the Pallene upgrade. This engine 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. These upgrades are expected to increase overall transaction throughput (TPS), enable near-instant responsiveness across DeFi, AI, and payments, improve developer user experience (UX) for high-frequency applications, and reduce latency for real-time, on-chain interactions.

Mirko Zhao, Cronos Labs Lead and Head of Product & Engineering, commented on the upgrade, stating, “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 is part of 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 made strides 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. Cronos is a leading blockchain ecosystem that has partnered with 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 three 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.