Cronos Labs appoints Zain Bacchus as CPO and Smit Vachhani as SVP of Growth

Cronos Labs is shaking up its leadership bench. The company has appointed Zain Bacchus as Chief Product Officer and Smit Vachhani as Senior Vice President of Growth, marking the first executive hires under new CEO Ryan Wyatt. The move signals a clear shift in strategy as Cronos sets its sights on building a unified, trading-first suite of onchain financial products.

Wyatt says the company is entering a new phase. “We are pursuing an ambitious new chapter for Cronos Labs to focus on Cronos becoming a leading venue for global capital markets,” he said. “Zain and Smit are world-class leaders with a proven history of shipping at scale. Together, we are focused on a ‘trading-first’ product strategy that replaces fragmented experiences with a cohesive, high-performance suite of applications.”

Bacchus arrives from Helius, where he led teams building low-latency infrastructure for Solana-based capital markets. Before that, he played a key role at OP Labs, helping grow the OP Stack from 40,000 daily transactions to more than 15 million. His background spans both consumer tech and blockchain, with earlier stops at Meta working on the Facebook app and at PwC in data and analytics. That mix of big-tech scale and crypto-native systems gives him a unique edge as Cronos looks to attract both retail traders and institutions.

For Bacchus, the appeal was clear. “The opportunity to help deliver the integrated product experience for the future of global finance is what brought me to Cronos,” he said. “By combining near-instant settlement afforded by Cronos with the massive distribution of Crypto.com, we can offer a level of capital efficiency that legacy systems simply cannot match. Our focus is clear: support the markets retail wants, provide the reliability and determinism that institutions demand, and deliver a seamless product experience to millions.”

Vachhani joins from Optimism, where he led DeFi initiatives that helped grow ecosystems to billions in net deposits. During his tenure, he worked on onboarding major names such as Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap, and Sony. Before that, he built consumer products at NVIDIA and LinkedIn. His entry into crypto came through high-frequency trading, giving him firsthand exposure to both DeFi and traditional market structures.

Vachhani sees Cronos as a bridge between old and new finance. “The lines between TradFi and DeFi are blurring fast, and Cronos is uniquely positioned to lead that convergence,” he said. “With Crypto.com’s 150 million users as our foundation, we’re pursuing partnerships and products that deliver real financial utility. The kind of products that simply weren’t possible before this moment in crypto.”

The hires land at a time when blockchains are racing to capture institutional trading volume. Cronos, backed by Crypto.com’s massive user base, wants to move beyond fragmented apps and offer a streamlined trading experience that feels familiar to Wall Street while staying native to crypto rails. Bacchus will shape product direction, while Vachhani focuses on partnerships and ecosystem growth.

For Wyatt, this is about building for scale from day one. The goal isn’t just to attract traders, but to create infrastructure capable of handling global capital flows onchain. With two executives who have already operated at massive scale, Cronos is betting it now has the leadership firepower to make that vision real.