Cronos Labs Names Ryan Wyatt as CEO

Cronos Labs today announced the appointment of Ryan Wyatt as CEO.

For the last 17 years, Ryan has worked at the intersection of gaming, tech, and crypto, building teams and products around communities. Over the past four years, Ryan has been full-time in crypto serving President at Polygon Labs, and most recently as Chief Growth Officer at Optimism, where he led efforts in bringing Kraken, Uniswap, Sony, Worldcoin, and more to the OP Stack and helped lead the expansion of that ecosystem. Before that, Ryan spent seven years at YouTube, where he helped build YouTube Gaming from an idea into one of the company’s largest verticals, generating billions in revenue by working closely with creators and game publishers.

“Cronos has a foundation with real potential, but a generic L1 strategy doesn’t play to its strengths,” said Wyatt. “We’re rebooting the project around one clear goal: building revenue-generating products and simple onramps into DeFi for Crypto.com’s users and beyond. Rather than competing on undifferentiated blockspace, Cronos is becoming a vertically integrated product company. We will own the flagship financial apps on top of our own chain, shipped as a cohesive suite of first-party applications distributed through Crypto.com, with their economics contributing directly to CRO buy-and-burn. Cronos will remain a permissionless ecosystem for all developers to deploy and build, but our focus will shift decisively toward driving meaningful value, usage, and fees through these first-party apps.”

Alongside Ryan’s appointment, Cronos Labs will be bringing on a Chief Product Officer and a Head of BD & Partnerships to help lead these efforts.

In the coming months, Cronos Labs will be unveiling a series of product launches and partnerships that will bring this vision to life.