The company behind Crypto.com was founded in 2016 by Kris Marszalek, Rafael Melo, Gary Or, and Bobby Bao in Hong Kong, originally under the name “Monaco” — a crypto-backed payments platform with its own wallet and a rechargeable Visa card. In 2017, Monaco issued the MCO token (a separate asset from CRO) via ICO, raising roughly $26.7 million.
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2018: the company renames itself Crypto.com after acquiring the domain from Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania cryptography professor, for an estimated $5–10 million.
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November 19, 2018: the CRO token is announced (initially as an ERC-20 on Ethereum), alongside plans for the Crypto.org Chain.
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December 2018: CRO lists on exchanges at roughly $0.02; falls to roughly $0.012 in early 2019.
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2021: Crypto.com burns 70 billion CRO tokens while distributing 5.9 billion CRO as rewards — significantly altering the circulating-to-max-supply ratio.
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November 2021: the Cronos mainnet launches — a Cosmos SDK-based, EVM-compatible chain running parallel to the Crypto.org Chain, using Tendermint BFT consensus, designed to let Ethereum developers easily port applications over.
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2022: the brand and ecosystem consolidate under the “Cronos” name.
Cronos essentially follows the same pattern as BNB: a crypto exchange/payments company built its own EVM-compatible blockchain to expand its user base (100+ million users) into a standalone DeFi/NFT/GameFi ecosystem.