CRO · a burn that got undone, paying itself back every month.

The chain still pays its stakers with newly minted CRO, but the tap is closing on a fixed schedule. A May 2026 upgrade set the print to shrink 6.8% every month on the way to zero, and it is working: the run rate fell from 958.1M a year at the start of this window to 782.2M a year at the end, and the supply counter moved by 210.3M across the 90 days. Blocks are also arriving slightly slower than the code assumes, which quietly trims another 1.5% off what actually gets paid.

This is the whole story. The 70B CRO burned in 2021 was re-created by a 2025 vote and parked in a locked account that pays out 1,166,666,667 CRO every 30.4 days until Mar 2030. Three of those payments landed in this window, on Jun 17, Jul 17 and Aug 17 2026, and the account balance fell by 3,500.0M — matching the calendar to half a coin. That is sixteen times what the chain itself mints. 43 more payments are still to come.

Every release in the window is already counted above, and no watched wallet sent CRO to market. Four balances are tracked: the locked reserve account still holding 50,166.7M with 43 scheduled payments left; the operating wallet that receives every payment and now holds 11,950.0M — a quarter of everything counted as tradable, and it kept 3,450.0M of the 3,500.0M released; the community pool, which grew from 193.7M to 225.3M and is the fuel for a future burn; and the CRO that a listed company bought for its own balance sheet in 2025 and did not sell when its CRO venture was cancelled on Aug 7 2026. If any of these balances falls between refreshes, the outflow lands in this row at the next refresh.

No bankruptcy estate, trustee schedule or court-ordered distribution applies to CRO.

The new lock tiers pay a bonus on top of ordinary staking, and that bonus does not come from fresh minting — the team pre-funded a pool with 50.0M CRO on Jun 11 2026. The pool has paid 0.4M of it out so far and still holds 49.6M. It is small today, but it scales with how much gets locked, so it is expected to run around 5.0M over the next 90 days.

There is no buyback contract on either Cronos chain, and none fired in the window. The May 2026 revenue plan names buying back CRO as one of four future uses of protocol income, but the revenue that would pay for it has not started arriving yet — monitored.

CRO is not burned by using the network. Cronos deliberately does the opposite of Ethereum here: the base fee and the tip both go to validators, not to a fire. Checked from both directions this build — the official burn address took in only 4,500 CRO of dust across 90 days, and the total number of CRO in existence went up, not down. The 200.0M sitting in that burn address is the four community burns from 2023 to 2025; none has fired in over a year.

The buyer that would have filled this row no longer exists. A listed company, Crypto.com and a listing vehicle cancelled their planned CRO treasury venture and the related fund partnership on Aug 7 2026. No discretionary open-market buying was observed in the window — monitored.

The one real offset, and it is brand new. The May 2026 upgrade added staking tiers that pay a bonus for committing CRO for one, two or four years, and it went into production on Aug 13 2026. Reading the lock module directly, it held 10,705 CRO on Jul 30 2026, 105.4M on Aug 17 and 491.1M across 466 positions on Aug 31 — so effectively all of it was locked inside this window. Two honest caveats: it is concentrated, with the largest single position at 105.3M and the top ten at 53.4% of the total, and total staked CRO rose by only 307.1M over the same period, so much of what is now locked for years was already staked before. It is carried flat into the next 90 days rather than extrapolated.