I'm about to expose Kronos, the CRO token, the chain, and Crypto.com all at once. In my opinion, all of it is going to zero. I've come to believe the tech here is fundamentally worthless. They've blown their money marketing all over the place in a flywheel system that has failed. Personally, this is one of the worst investments I ever made in crypto. I lost thousands of dollars getting into the debit card and exchange hype. I bought in at around 30-something cents, then sold down at around 6 cents, and a year later the price is still sitting at about 8 cents. This is an absolute dumpster fire.
I'm telling you this because I don't want you to lose any more money in crypto. You don't have to make bad investments like I've done over and over again. Once you find something like Internet Computer Protocol, which I believe has the best tech in crypto, and you compare that to Kronos, I honestly feel very ignorant for ever having bought into this. So let me give you the facts as I understand them.
Built on the Cosmos SDK, which means centralized tech
The fact is that Kronos is a blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK. That means, just like every other thing built this way, when you're building anything that involves Kronos, including Crypto.com, all of the stuff is on centralized tech except the token ledger. And in my view, that's pretty much useless.
When you see the website talking about how the Kronos future is the center of AI innovation where agents seamlessly interact and create enduring value, I consider this blatantly fraudulent. The blockchain itself cannot do anything meaningful with AI agents on it at all, which means everything they're talking about is happening on centralized tech. That tech is very vulnerable to being hacked, the AI cannot pay for its own computation, and you have to use centralized finance to pay for the hosting. Compare that to something like Internet Computer Protocol, which can run AI models as real smart contracts, fully on-chain. And it's about the same market cap as Kronos.
Holding an exchange token gives you no ownership
The whole idea with crypto, as I see it, is that we invest in technology that lets us cut out the middleman. All the hype around Kronos involves Crypto.com, but nothing on the Kronos blockchain gives you any ownership of Crypto.com. Crypto.com could easily be running a very profitable business and making a lot of money while Kronos goes to zero.
Holding an exchange token is one of the most ignorant things I see in crypto. If you have an exchange, the thing to do would be to hold a stock that has legal ownership over the exchange. When you're holding a token, you have no legal ownership and no ownership by code. So holding the CRO token has no real value tied to Crypto.com. That is intentionally confusing for investors, because when you get tricked into buying the CRO token, as I did, you're thinking all about Crypto.com marketing CRO. But Crypto.com could easily just let CRO go to zero, move their exchange onto the ICP, and they could do just fine while all the CRO holders get screwed.
I just looked at an article they reposted of a guy talking to all the CRO capitulators, basically saying "Bye, Felicia." There are supposedly a ton of great points in there. Everything he hypes up about Kronos and CRO, in my opinion, is junk. It's absolute junk. He points to things like, oh, they're in the White House, oh, they allocate money to make America the world capital of crypto. Crypto.com is based in Singapore. And Kronos is a blockchain easily created with the Cosmos SDK that Crypto.com is trying to give speculative value to. There's absolutely no reason, as a retail investor, to hold this, even if you were using Crypto.com to buy the CRO token.
The debit card that scraped thousands off of me
Unless you've been tricked into something like the debit card, which I believe they absolutely defrauded us with, there's no reason to touch CRO. They tricked us into buying the debit card by paying ambassadors to push CRO. They pay all these ambassadors to push it, the ambassadors are getting paid to push it, and that fools people like me a couple of years ago into buying enough CRO for the debit card on Crypto.com. Then the price tanks, and then they change the terms to make holding the debit card nearly worthless. They scraped thousands of dollars off of me, with no consequences to them for doing that. I was the fool who bought this, and I'm going to make sure to help as many other people as I can not be the fool I was.
The technology here, in my honest assessment, is fundamentally worthless. I've been in crypto 11 years. I found the best technology in crypto, drastically undervalued, that I believe absolutely changes the game. That means I have an easier time seeing what's really important when I scroll through this stuff. And I don't see one thing here. This is all talk, no action. What I define as action is getting technology that's actually fundamentally useful for people.
ETFs, DAO proposals, and throwing money around
Then you're talking about a DAO proposal about a bold plan to restore Kronos' golden age and to get an ETF. If an ETF is your plan to get rich with a crypto, you're counting on more ignorant money than you pouring in and buying something you already bought. To me that doesn't seem like a good value proposition. Think about the people putting money into mutual funds, just throwing money at retirement, handing it to a financial advisor. In my opinion, those are some of the most ignorant investors in the world, and some of the most self-centered, not considering at all what their money is being used for. It's just "here, take all my money and give me more of it back."
Seriously, why aren't you choosing consciously where to invest your money? Are you really too busy to do one of the most important things you can do with your money, which is to think about where you're going to invest and what kinds of things are going to get done with it? When you're just throwing money around hoping for a return, you can't tell the difference between giving money to somebody who's doing something evil, like raising animals in farming and killing them, keeping them in horrible conditions, or exploiting people, paying them almost nothing, using slave labor to produce cheap products that then get sold and fail. You can't tell the difference between funding that and funding meaningful innovation that really helps the planet. When you're just throwing your money around without researching, I believe you're contributing to the evil in the world that you don't want. And to me, Kronos and everything with it is exactly that.
When I look at "a bold plan to restore Kronos' golden age," I don't see why Kronos would have a golden age unless more people get tricked into buying a worthless token that has no ownership over Crypto.com and that has been used to fundraise a bunch of money to market Crypto.com. Centralized crypto exchanges are, in my opinion, the biggest problem we have in crypto. This is where most people's money gets stolen, most token prices get manipulated, and most investors are wasting money and not even actually holding the crypto themselves.
Everything that's wrong with crypto in one coin
To me, this is an example of every single thing that's wrong with crypto. A blockchain that is technologically worthless. A company that is pushing a chain to make themselves money, while all these holders have no ownership over the actual resources like Crypto.com and all the marketing. The Crypto.com marketing doesn't even directly benefit the Kronos chain. All these sponsorships and stuff come from people who've heard of Crypto.com and use Crypto.com, and many of them don't even know about Kronos. And Kronos has proven to be a terrible investment for the vast majority of people, including me, who have bought it.
Here's the thing, though. Yes, ICP, if you look at that chart, has been a terrible investment too for most of the people who bought it. But they have what I consider the best technology in crypto. They have technology I use every day that can eliminate the need for centralized exchanges to even exist. When you have a centralized exchange like this, set up as a coin, you are setting up the next Bybit hack. By supporting this, you're contributing to the next Bybit hack.
And then the Explorer. They don't even make it easy. You have SoulScan, which it looks like they just paid to be listed there. You can't even easily access the Explorer from the site. The AI agent talk is, in my view, absolute narrative misdirection junk. "Crypto to cash seamlessly" really means getting scraped on fees on this debit card. It's worse than any of the other debit cards I have in my wallet. I threw the stupid thing out.
I've been there and done this so you don't have to. I'm here to help you learn from my experience, and you can find much more of how I think about this in my Money playlist. You can chat with me directly on the blockchain on OpenChat.