Cronos Labs Appoints Chief Product Officer and SVP of Growth
Cronos Labs expands its leadership team with the appointment of Zain Bacchus as Chief Product Officer and Smit Vachhani as SVP of Growth
Cronos Labs today announced the appointments of Zain Bacchus as Chief Product Officer and Smit Vachhani as SVP of Growth. These are the first two senior appointments made by recently announced Cronos Labs CEO, Ryan Wyatt, and further signal Cronos’ strategic pivot to distribute a unified, trading-first suite of first-party applications designed to bring global capital markets onchain.
“We are pursuing an ambitious new chapter for Cronos Labs to focus on Cronos becoming a leading venue for global capital markets,” said Wyatt. “Zain and Smit are world-class leaders with a proven history of shipping at scale. Together, we are focused on a ‘trading-first’ product strategy that replaces fragmented experiences with a cohesive, high-performance suite of applications.”
Zain joins Cronos Labs from Helius, where he led cross-functional teams focused on building low-latency and high-availability Solana capital markets infrastructure. Prior to Helius, Zain was a key contributor at OP Labs and helped scale the OP Stack from 40K to over 15M daily transactions. Before diving into crypto at Helius and OP Labs, Zain sharpened his product and growth skills at Meta (working on the Facebook App) and began his career in data and analytics at PwC. His proven track record of shipping products at scale across consumer platforms and blockchain infrastructure aligns with the growth and development plans for Cronos Labs.
“The opportunity to help deliver the integrated product experience for the future of global finance is what brought me to Cronos,” said Zain Bacchus. “By combining near-instant settlement afforded by Cronos with the massive distribution of Crypto.com, we can offer a level of capital efficiency that legacy systems simply cannot match. Our focus is clear: support the markets retail wants, provide the reliability and determinism that institutions demand, and deliver a seamless product experience to millions.”
Smit joins Cronos Labs from Optimism, where he led DeFi initiatives that scaled chain ecosystems to billions in net deposits and onboarded major enterprises including Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap, and Sony. Prior to Optimism, Smit sharpened his technical edge in building consumer products at NVIDIA and LinkedIn. His journey into crypto professionally started in HFT, where he developed a deeper understanding of both DeFi and TradFi market structures. With a blend of expertise across product, business, and engineering, Smit is positioned to drive the next phase of growth at Cronos.
“The lines between TradFi and DeFi are blurring fast, and Cronos is uniquely positioned to lead that convergence,” said Smit Vachhani. “With Crypto.com’s 150 million users as our foundation, we’re pursuing partnerships and products that deliver real financial utility. The kind of products that simply weren’t possible before this moment in crypto.”