- Cronos EVM v1.5.0 officially launched today, October 30.
- The upgrade introduces new EVM opcodes, smart accounts, and enhanced interoperability.
- Smarturn aims to make the blockchain more flexible, faster, and developer-friendly.
The Cronos blockchain has announced the release of its long-awaited Smarturn upgrade, ushering in a new phase in the network’s evolution.
The update delivers substantial improvements to Cronos’ Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), including enhanced interoperability, improved ecosystem performance, and smoother wallet functionality.
According to the announcement:
This mainnet upgrade marks a major leap in Cronos’ evolution — unlocking smart accounts, new EVM features, and improved performance for developers and users alike.
🚀 Cronos EVM upgrade complete — “Smarturn” is here!
This mainnet upgrade marks a major leap in Cronos’ evolution — unlocking smart accounts, new EVM features, and improved performance for developers and users alike.
Here’s what’s new 👇 pic.twitter.com/6Vi4K8BUbL
— Cronos (@cronos_chain) October 30, 2025
The network paused operations temporarily for about 60 minutes to integrate the new components.
Services are now being restored gradually as the Cronos ecosystem reaches this key milestone.
Smarturn aims to transform Cronos by delivering greater speed and compatibility through its new capabilities.
Smarter accounts arrive on Cronos
High-level support for EIP-7702 smart accounts sits at the heart of Cronos’ latest upgrade. With this feature, regular user wallets (externally owned accounts, or EOAs) can operate as smart contract wallets.
This capability removes previous limitations that required separate accounts for different actions. According to the official blog:
EIP-7702 closes this gap by allowing EOAs to act as smart contracts. The assigned contract code remains in effect until the account issues a new authorization, which can be applied to a single chain or multiple chains simultaneously.
Users can now perform a variety of tasks without switching account types, including flexible gas payment methods, customized permissions, batch processing of many transactions, and programmable wallet behavior.
With EIP-7702, Cronos joins a small group of EVM-compatible platforms that offer this level of account abstraction, combining automated control with simplicity.
This functionality will advance DeFi platforms and decentralized applications (dApps) on Cronos by improving efficiency and ease of use.
Significant performance boost
Cronos also updated its EVM runtime to run on go-Ethereum v1.15.11, aligning with Ethereum’s Prague and Cancun upgrades.
The upgrade is designed to make contract execution and transactions cheaper and faster.
It also brings broad client improvements and new EVM opcodes to Cronos to enhance efficiency, developer experience, and debugging. The team noted:
These opcodes collectively make contract execution more efficient for complex DeFi, game contracts that handle multiple operations per transaction, and other compute-heavy applications.
Together, these changes make the Cronos EVM runtime faster, lighter, and more developer-focused.
Improved interoperability and developer tooling
Smarturn also enhances infrastructure for cross-chain builders and developers.
For example, a new RPC endpoint enables retrieving full block data with a single query.
That’s a win for dApp backends, analytics dashboards, and blockchain explorers.
Additionally, the mempool now allows users to cancel or speed up pending transactions.
That improves responsiveness during periods of heavy network load.
Cronos has also adopted IBC v2 via ibc-go v10.1.1 to strengthen cross-chain communication.
CRO price outlook
The altcoin traded around $0.1470 after falling about 1.5% over the previous 24 hours.
Its daily trading volume plunged by more than 60%, signaling reduced market enthusiasm.
Still, CRO’s movement reflects broader market trends.
Bitcoin was trading below the key $110,000 level after losing nearly 3% in the prior 24 hours.
Markets lost momentum following cautious comments from Powell regarding a potential rate cut in December.