CRO (Cronos) is the native token of the Cronos chain, a decentralised, open-source, energy-efficient public blockchain with high speed and low transaction fees. It is also the token of choice for crypto.com's ecosystem. Owners of CRO can unlock certain features on the app, including:

• Staking CRO to own a CDC credit card with several cool features including airport lounge access, spotify and netflix rebates
• Lower fees on the CDC Exchange App 
• Purchasing items on CDCs shop via their pay feature

Despite access to all these cool features, the price of the CRO token has been in freefall since market 2022.

However, that seems to have changed in recent times, with the token registering an eye-popping 75% increase in the past month (at the time of writing). In contrast, famous names like Bitcoin have increased by "only" 36%.

2 potential reasons why CRO price may increase in the following year include:

• Stable and Clean track record compared to competitors
• Potential Product incentives

Clean track record and Regulatory Adherence

This bear market has not been kind to crypto exchanges. Just off the top of my head i remember:

• FTX, Celsius and Voyager collapsing
• Binance running into trouble with the SEC (link) 
• Binance running into trouble with Brazil (link)
• Gemini losing their Earn funds and suing Genesis (link)

With crypto exchanges running into all sorts of regulatory troubles, crypto.com is poised to profit just by being able to legally provide their services in the markets they are in. This allows them to offer more incentives to customers and increase the buying pressure on CRO. 

Potential Product incentives

During the bear market, crypto.com reduced many of their Visa card perks and benefits in order to keep the business healthy. While this has disappointed many users at that time, CDC would point to their continued survival as a testament to how important those moves were. Without card perks, fewer customers would keep (or stake) CRO and this would have been the main reason for the drop in value of the token in the past months. But in an AMA in May 2023, CDC CEO Kris Marszalek promised that the CDC card perks would return "as the market recovers". (Hear it for yourself here)

Now that the market has improved and CRO token has increased in valuation, it is very possible that CDC would start thinking about customer acquisition and bring back the card benefits. 

Crypto.com is poised to be one of the winners of the bull market. Im bullish on the CRO token and the Cronos ecosystem.