Cronos Labs appoints 'Ryan Wyatt' as new CEO…initiates shift to product-focused strategy

Blockchain technology company Cronos Labs has appointed Ryan Wyatt as CEO and is shifting its business strategy. It plans to move away from its existing general-purpose Layer 1 strategy by prioritizing revenue-generating products and building user-centric DeFi infrastructure.

Cronos announced on the 17th that it had officially appointed Ryan Wyatt as the new CEO on the 15th. CEO Wyatt is a figure who has built community-centered organizations and products across the gaming, technology, and blockchain industries for approximately 17 years, and has focused on the blockchain industry for the past four years.

He served as President at Polygon Labs and later as Chief Growth Officer (CGO) at Optimism, where he led partnership expansion by bringing Kraken, Uniswap, Sony, Worldcoin, and others into the OP Stack ecosystem. Previously, he worked at YouTube for about seven years and contributed to growing YouTube Gaming from an initial idea into a core business unit.

CEO Wyatt assessed Cronos's existing strategy as "having a solid foundation and potential, but it is difficult to fully leverage its strengths with only a general-purpose Layer 1 strategy." He said, "Cronos Labs will focus on building a simple DeFi on-ramp centered on revenue-generating products that encompasses Crypto.com users and beyond."

"We will move away from undifferentiated blockspace competition and transition to a vertically integrated, product-focused company," he added, "providing core financial applications built on its own blockchain as first-party applications and distributing them through Crypto.com, designing the economic structure to directly contribute to Cronos (CRO) token buybacks and burns."

He also emphasized, "We will maintain a permissionless ecosystem while focusing on driving real value creation, user usability, and sustainable, fee-based growth." This indicates an emphasis on building an ecosystem accompanied by actual usage and revenue structures rather than merely expanding developer inflow.

Along with this CEO appointment, Cronos Labs plans to recruit a Chief Product Officer (CPO) and a head of business development and partnerships to support strategy execution. The company intends to sequentially disclose new product launches and strategic partnerships over the coming months to concretize its mid- to long-term vision.