Cronos Labs Names Mirko Zhao To Lead Cronos Labs
March 25, 2025 – Cronos Labs today announced the appointment of Mirko Zhao to lead Cronos Labs and serve as Head of Product and Engineering.
Mirko has been at the forefront of DeFi as the Head of Product and leader of the incubation program at Cronos Labs for the past three years. Before joining Cronos Labs as Head of Product in June 2022, Mirko has been immersed in the blockchain and DeFi sectors since 2019, bringing a wealth of experience in product leadership. Mirko replaces Ken Timsit following Timsit’s departure.
“At Cronos, I have witnessed the resiliency of the blockchain and the unrelenting dedication of the CRO community over the past four years,” said Mirko. “We have a strong foundation with an untapped opportunity to be one of the industry’s leading innovators. My job is very clear – take this blockchain to the next level with an aggressive roadmap while driving deeper community engagement.”
Previously, Mirko co-founded Orin, a startup dedicated to digitizing supply chain data, which garnered grants from both Y Combinator and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. Mirko’s dynamic career also includes pivotal roles at Flexport, where he was the first Product Manager in the APAC region, spearheading initiatives to optimize global trade, and at PayPal, where he served as an Agile Project Manager, supporting multiple tech teams on merchant and data science projects.
About Cronos
Cronos (cronos.org) is a leading blockchain ecosystem, adopted by more than 500 application developers and partners representing an addressable user base of more than 80 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 3 chains: Cronos (EVM), the leading Ethereum-compatible blockchain built on Cosmos SDK; Cronos POS, a leading Cosmos chain for payments and NFTs; and Cronos zkEVM, a new high-performance layer 2 network.
Cronos ranks among the top 15 blockchain ecosystems, safeguarding more than 6 billion dollars of user assets. Since launching in 2021, it has securely settled more than 100 million transactions.
Cronos Labs is the $100M startup accelerator focused on Cronos.