Cronos targets EVM v1.8 mainnet move for 22 October
Cronos has scheduled its EVM v1.8 mainnet upgrade for October 22, 2026. The pre-release says do not switch yet, and libp2p is still not enabled on mainnet.
Cronos has scheduled, not completed, the v1.8 upgrade of its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) mainnet for October 22, 2026. The October 14 newsletter, bylined Bryan, credits Cronos Labs in the footer and still uses that future date. The v1.8.0 binary, published as a pre-release on September 24, opens with "WARNING: DO NOT upgrade to this binary immediately", and the plan name operators must stage is v1.8. A date on the page is not an activation, which is also the point of Unichain's scheduled OP Enterprise move.
The throughput lines are simulations, not a live mainnet result. A September 25 post from the Cronos Network account said this version would bring "~20% faster median block times" and "up to 66% higher sustained throughput in mainnet simulations". Thomas, whose public profile says he builds open-source software at Cronos, wrote on October 14 that cluster simulations showed "significant double-digit throughput gains" and that an ideal single-node test delivered a "~15% boost in peak execution throughput". The newsletter repeats neither figure. DeFiLlama's Cronos page, dated October 18, 2026, showed $137.79 million of Total Value Locked (TVL) and 40,363 transactions over 24 hours. That is the live load those simulations have not replaced.
What is in the binary, and what stays off
The release note and Thomas's October 14 post describe the peer-to-peer stack as swapped to libp2p. The newsletter, the same day, says the integration is experimental and "not yet enabled on mainnet". A September 29 post invited operators to try the new networking stack on testnet. On September 30 the account said v1.8 was live on testnet, with mainnet still targeted for October 22. Testnet is not this EVM mainnet.
The application-side mempool is opt-in. The migration guide says existing configurations keep working and the default mempool type remains flood. Setting that type to app without a positive max-txs panics on startup, because the default of -1 disables the pool. Block-STM, which the newsletter says has matured inside the Cosmos SDK, is recommended for validators, RPC nodes and archive nodes. Sequential is still the default executor, so parallel execution does not flip on by itself at the halt.
The binary moves the Cosmos SDK to v0.54.3, Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) via IBC-Go to v11, CometBFT to v0.39 and go-ethereum to v1.16.9, which the note says enables the Osaka hardfork on Cronos. It claims more than 80 Ethereum API methods and EVM equivalence above 90%, plus more than 40 bug fixes, and RocksDB v10.9.1 with experimental storage profiles by node role. The cosmovisor directory must be named exactly v1.8. Neither the guide nor the newsletter prints a block height.
What integrators cannot leave on the old path
At the upgrade height, SendCroToIbc is restricted to authorized contracts, Interchain Accounts (ICA) are removed, and MsgTurnBridge is dropped. Calldata-heavy transactions pick up a minimum gas cost, and governance bounds tighten. The json-rpc txfee-cap, ignored for eth_sendRawTransaction on v1.7, is enforced when the binary swaps. The guide says the default of 1 CRO is too low: at the mainnet minimum of 375 gwei it covers about 2.6 million gas, and about 5% of recent mainnet transactions exceed it. The recommended setting before the swap is 0, or at least 100. A per-transaction gas cap of 16,777,216 is not part of this height. It needs a separate governance change.
Who has spoken, and what would count as done
Excited to share that the Cronos EVM mainnet v1.8 upgrade is targeted for October 22, 2026.
That is Thomas, asking operators to read the guide before the date. On DeFiLlama's October 18 ranking, VVS Finance was the largest line at $93 million of TVL and Tectonic was listed at $20.46 million. No upgrade notice from either protocol was in the sources opened for this piece.
The next observable is whether October 22 produces a halt under plan name v1.8. Shardeum's completed v1.1.0 halt is what that looks like once a height is named and blocks resume. Cronos has published neither a height nor an activation. Operators who swap early are doing what the release note forbids. After a halt, check whether libp2p stays off, whether the fee cap rejects ordinary transactions, and whether SendCroToIbc and ICA callers still work. The new mempool and Block-STM stay opt-in, as Solana's larger transaction size was opt-in to send. Until the newsletter says the plan has activated, Cronos v1.8 is a target, not a result.
This article is informational analysis only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can lose substantial value rapidly. Past performance and historical patterns do not guarantee future results. Do your own research and consult a regulated financial adviser before making any investment decision.
Reporting by Karthik Subramanian. Filed 18 October 2026, 08:42 GMT.
Digital Assets Correspondent
Karthik Subramanian is a founder, writer, and technology consultant with nine years in the crypto ecosystem.
