This guide will provide insight into using the cryptocurrency token, the different utilities, and staking CRO benefits. The article explains the fundamental analysis of the coin to understand its utility and future use cases; This is not a piece of investment advice; this is a semi-technical guide to analyse the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

You should read this article if you’re curious to know more about Crypto.com strategy and Crypto:CRO (token) and its current and future utilities. This post is NOT a paid partnership;

We will divide the article exploring:

Crypto.com or CDC is a centralised cryptocurrency exchange app founded in June 2016 by Kris Marszalek, Rafael Melo, Gary Or &Bobby Bao, based in Singapore. The slogan behind the platform, which at the time was called “Monaco Technologies GmbH”, is:

— — — Putting Cryptocurrency in every wallet — — —

The company was renamed crypto.com in 2018 after acquiring the domain owned by Matt Blaze, a cryptography researcher, for an amount that is estimated to be between 5 and 10 million US dollars. The amount of money places crypto.com in one of the TOP 25 most paid domains on the world wide web.

At the time of writing the crypto.com platform has Ten million users and more than 3,000 employees and multiple features including an integrated app platform, an exchange, a non-custodial wallet, last but not least, a lending service and crypto deposit earning.

Crypto.com is known for its aggressive marketing strategy and the multi-million dollar sponsorship that varies from the UFC, Formula One, Serie A, and recently the nomination of Matt Damon as a brand ambassador.

In 2021, the company won the naming right for Staples Center in Los Angeles, paying around 700 million to change the arena’s name to crypto.com.

At the time of writing, the three main focus points of the platform are:

A strong community and the ability to trade more than 200+ cryptocurrencies using a more than simplistic User Interface and a very curated User Experience; UI and UX are fundamental to achieving the company’s vision. So far, they are doing a fantastic job!

A credit card that gives you benefit! Think about your Qantas point if you’re Australian, but convert it into CRO. Also, add all the benefits like “FREE” Spotify from the low tier cards.

An earning program that allows you to make up to 14.5% yield on the cryptocurrencies you’re holding!

Now that we know more about the CRO creator, let’s dip into how and why you should use the CRO token inside and outside the crypto.com platform.

The idea behind the CRO token is to exploit the nature of the blockchain to offer a bridge between a merchant and cryptocurrency users, offering instant and low-cost transactions within a secure and safe environment.

If we want to summarise this in a single sentence, crypto.com is trying to become the new Paypal of the crypto space!

The idea is to offer up to 50.000 transactions per second and use the decentralisation concept to make crypto payment the mainstream option; The goal of crypto.com is to give the ownership, and the management of the payment flows starting from the authorisation for the transaction up until the final settlement.

CRO is crypto.com’s official/native coin based on the Etherum Blockchain (ERC20 token). It provides CDC users with many benefits within the ecosystem and trades the cash for other crypto coins or FIAT currency.

As a native coin for the public crypto.com blockchain, CRO tokens are principally used for settlement, meaning that every transaction that occurs in the chain needs to be backed by CRO to pay for the block transaction fees.

Tokens are mainly earned as rewards for processing and verifying transactions. Each node can stake a fixed amount of CRO tokens in exchange for the right to participate in the network’s operations.

The principal use of the token is for settlement allowing you to pay for real-life products and services with your Crypto by converting them into FIAT currency in real-time.

Crypto.com CARD is the tool they use to allow the user to do this transaction seamlessly; charge your card with cryptocurrency, and behind the scene, the platform will convert your tokens into FIAT currency at the time of purchase.

CRO is hosted on Ethereum and is a PoS (Proof-of-stake) blockchain network. For Staking the token and having a healthy blockchain, the everyday user can stake their coin by the delegated-proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus protocol.

Clients can delegate to a Validator an amount of CRO tokens used to validate transactions on the Crypto.org Chain Network; In return, the platform will reward them with CRO block rewards distributed across the delegators after discounting the validator commission.

As we previously mentioned, the crypto.com chain utilises the Ethereum blockchain, enabling ERC20 compatibility. The network uses a (PoW) Proof of Work algorithm by the Ethash function that requires that the hashing process output create a hash value lower than the threshold that the network has tweaked to ensure blocks minting executing at an appropriate rate.

Crypto.org chain utilises a structured approach of identifying and prioritising potential threats to a system and determining the value that possible mitigations would have in reducing or neutralising those threats.

This ensures that the network can adequately predict, identify, and protect the blockchain against threats using the STRIDE model, which focuses on:

The architecture of the blockchain subdivides nodes into different categories, and each one of them has a precise task:

Council nodes

Council nodes get rewards for each transaction they process as they are responsible for validating settlements and managing the trades in general.

Acquirer nodes

Merchant and customer acquirer nodes provide escrow services, manage settlements for other users, and provide other services and verification related to merchants’ transactions. Acquirer nodes get a percentage of the reward based on each trade they process.

Settlement agent nodes

These nodes sell CRO tokens for stable currencies and settle their operations to ensure merchants access stable price conversion options post-settlement. Settlement agent nodes get a flat-rate fee for each fiat payout they process.

Community nodes

Community nodes help customers and merchants to complete direct transactions. These nodes also serve as a home base for other users wishing to monitor various operations.

The amount of confirmation needed to establish a successful transaction is 35. A completed transaction is irreversible as it will be officially “printed” into the blockchain, and as you know, the blockchain is immutable.

Purchasing the coin is not the only way to own it; The vision of crypto.com is solid and wants even everyday users to acquire CRO in different forms such as:

One of the first methods to earn CRO is to use a crypto.com VISA card for your day-to-day;

There are five cards available to crypto.com’s users; Each one of them requires you to stake a certain amount of CRO token in the platform and rewards you with multiple benefits. I’ll do another article explaining the aftermath of having one of these cards; In the meanwhile, the most crucial information is the CRO Rewards that is the cashback (in CRO) obtained for the purchase made with the card*;

For example, if you purchase a coffee in Sydney where the average is $5.00, you will get rewarded ~0.50 in CRO. Moreover, the more exclusive the card is, the more benefit you will get (e.g. with the Ruby Steel, you will get 100% cashback on your Spotify subscription).

To obtain the card at the time of writing, you must stake CRO coins. Staking CRO coins will give you rewards, too. Therefore it is a win-win.

*Not all the transactions will accumulate rewards.

The Crypto.com EARN is a new product that facilitates the rewards of the cryptocurrency while you’re holding your crypto coins in your wallet with the minimum effort.

Make sure that before you use this product, you understand that some of the offers will lock your coins for a certain period, where you cannot sell them.

The term staking means locking and securing your Crypto holding for a defined amount of time to obtain rewards/interest. Being Crypto.com chain the official chain of the platform, you can imagine that staking CRO is the best reward activity.

The platform gives you benefit such as having very high APY and at the same time getting access to the more advanced VISA CARD that would open you more benefit in return.

PoS (Proof of Stake) is a consensus mechanism used to validate the undergoing transactions. With this type of system, any CRO holder can decide to stake their token to help the network validate a new block of transaction and get rewarded in return.

Stay up-to-date reading the https://blog.crypto.com/crypto-org-chain-intergalactic-roadmap/ CRO’s roadmap. With the aggressive marketing and the more people using the platform, crypto.com is becoming one of the first centralised Crypto exchanges globally. Be sure they will not miss the opportunity to become one of the most used blockchains.

The CRO token had no pre-sale, public sale, or ICO; The token itself is 100% decentralised.

Qantstamp and Certik have audited the smart contract used for daily distribution and the ERC20 Token.

A little over 25B are currently in circulation, and the remaining 5B are used for mainnet staking rewards over the next 10’ish years (now ~173m have been distributed). The coin’s total supply was 100B; the difference between the entire supply and the max supply suggests a deflationary currency.

These figures are fundamental when evaluating a crypto project; Due to the basic principle of supply and demand, the supply of coins significantly influences the currency’s price.

The biggest burning event took place after the lunch of mainnet, where crypto.com burned 70 billion CRO. This event is the most extensive burn ever occurred in the crypto space when writing. (Do you remember when I told you about aggressive marketing? you can take this event as an example, having crypto.com in all the headlines)

The situation after the burn looks like this, where 5.9B will be used for mainnet block rewards for chain validator.

The market capitalisation at the time of writing is:

Why is Crypto.com paying rewards for staking the CRO token? Because the Crypto:CRO is what powers the Crypto.org blockchain that, as we discussed before, is a Proof Of Stake network; The PoS (Proof of Stake) needs people staking coins to be able to mint/forge a new block; With the creation of a new block, the node/validator gets all the fees associated with the transactions inside, and part of those will be transferred to the delegator (crypto.com’s CRO stakers / EARN users)

The number of contributors is relatively small if compared with other blockchains:

And this could be reflected by the low amount of commits:

github.com.

FacebookCrypto.com has around 400k people following Facebook, with more than 350k liking their page.

TwitterTwitter is one of the de-facto social media for cryptocurrencies, and Crypto.com has a blast with 1.5M followers.

LinkedinBecause crypto.com is a centralised exchange, the best metrics to check on LinkedIn is the number of employees: 2000+

RedditThe Reddit community of Crypto has almost 150k members

This article is not an investment guide or financial advice; if you want to invest in this token, please DYOR (Do Your Research).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this publication. You get curious about the CRO and the crypto.com platform; If you think of investing money, use only the money you can lose; cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can cause huge losses.

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