Author: Azuma, Odaily

Crypto.com and its affiliated blockchain Cronos have recently staged one of the most absurd governance farces in the history of blockchain - 70 billion tokens (the current total supply of CRO is 30 billion) were minted out of thin air, and despite the strong opposition from retail investors, their voices were completely turned into a joke in the face of the official 'veto power'.

The Cause: The official proposed to re-mint 70 billion tokens

The event can be traced back to March 3.

On that day, Cronos announced a bold plan (truly bold) to reshape the golden age of Cronos, and invested a large amount of funds to support the Cronos roadmap (including ETF) and the ambition to make the US the capital of the cryptocurrency world. To support this plan, Cronos proposed to reverse the 700 million token burn event in February 2021 (note, Cronos' X announcement didn't even dare to explicitly mention this figure), and use this share to build a Cronos strategic reserve.

Specifically, Cronos proposed to re-issue these 70 billion CRO to the Cronos strategic reserve custody wallet, restoring the total CRO supply to the original 100 billion at genesis. The newly minted tokens will be locked for 10 years (calculated from the genesis of CRO), and then linearly unlocked on a monthly basis.

Progress: The community strongly opposed, the official may have 'rigged the vote'

Obviously, no matter how Cronos trumpets this proposal, such a large-scale issuance will inevitably dilute the value of CRO, and ordinary token holders cannot ignore this.

The Mintscan governance voting record shows that on the first day of the proposal voting, the opposition rate reached as high as 95.7%, which can basically be said to have been met with extreme opposition from the community... However, this was of no use.

As shown in the figure below, with the intervention of some mysterious force, the approval rate (green line) was difficult to overturn the opposition rate (red line) - temporarily ignoring the sudden rise of the green line at the end.

The reason why it is called a mysterious force is that during the vast majority of the governance cycle from March 3 to March 17, the approval votes always led the opposition votes in a very unnatural weak advantage - it seems that this mysterious force once wanted to maintain a kind of intense 'illusion' of pro and con opinions.

Climax: This time they didn't even bother to pretend!

This jarring balance lasted until just before the end of the vote.

According to Cronos' governance rules (why bother with this set-up anyway), in addition to the requirement for the approval rate, the governance proposal also requires a participation rate of more than 33.4% to pass. At that time, the participation rate of this proposal did not meet this condition. In other words, even if the approval rate was higher at that time, the proposal could not be passed.

So Cronos simply didn't bother to pretend - about 3.35 billion CRO directly cast their votes in favor at the last moment. This is also why the green line in the figure above suddenly rose at the end.

According to the disclosure of UnChained, three independent sources revealed that Crypto.com and Cronos actually control 70-80% of the voting rights.

The reason why a balance was maintained for a while before was that among the verification nodes controlled by Crypto.com, only Starship and Falcon Heavy had taken action, and at the last moment, the other three verification nodes Electron, Antares and Minotaur IV also joined the fray.

You can clearly see the huge disparity between the official power and the retail investors' voting rights in the figure below.

Finally, the proposal was 'safely' passed with the participation of the official forces, and the 70 billion CRO will be officially minted and await entry into circulation.

Regarding this absurd governance farce, a large number of CRO holders have expressed extremely disappointed attitudes, and some even directly said that this is an insult to the community.

Bonus: Let me tell you what real insult is!

Is this considered an insult? Cronos obviously doesn't think so.

After the above proposal was passed, Cronos X announced another proposal in a high-profile manner, proposing to burn 50 million CRO - a mere 0.07% of the 70 billion, this is what real insult is!

According to the historical burn records posted by Cronos, two burn periods will be executed each year, 50 million CRO per period, totaling 100 million CRO per year.

A community member joked about this, saying: "It looks like it will only take about 1,400 burns to eliminate these 70 billion CRO. So it will only take another 700 years to restore the current supply."

That's Cronos for you, this may be the mindset of building a "century-old enterprise".