Author: TechFlow
Blockchain is a market that pursues efficiency extremely:
Public chains are revolving around TPS, aiming to bring faster transaction speeds; LST/LRT nesting dolls are stacked layer by layer, committed to achieving higher capital efficiency; various new angles emerge every day in the Meme super cycle, and many projects go from blooming to falling in just one day.
But this efficiency does not seem to be reflected in blockchain product development:
If you want to develop a product based on a blockchain, you must first study the chain intensively and understand its consensus mechanism, account model, gas design, development language, testing tools and other important designs;
If you want to further improve your product features, such as introducing location and payment functions for hotel booking products, this is commonplace in Web2. You can directly choose to integrate mature products such as Google Map and Alipay, but in the blockchain world, in most cases you need to build everything from scratch;
If you want to reach more ecological users, you need to support more chains, but each chain has its own rules, and the ever-lowering threshold for launching chains has brought more chains to the industry. You must be like a general who is expanding the territory, breaking through each blockchain ecological city one by one to achieve a wider range of integration...
Every step seriously slows down development efficiency and actually affects product function presentation and user experience, because developers always need to spend 90% of their energy to implement the most basic functions and cannot focus on innovation.
Who will help blockchain developers who are stuck in reinventing the wheel?
Dedicated to abstracting on-chain smart contract interactions and building blockchain development shortcuts through Shortcuts, Enso is attracting more and more attention due to its outstanding performance in lowering the threshold for developers to build and realizing intentional interactions: According to official data, Enso currently supports 75+ projects and has achieved on-chain settlement of more than US$16 billion.
In addition, Enso has raised a total of US$9.2 million in financing, and has been favored by a number of well-known institutions including Polychain capital, Multicoin Capital, Cyber fund, Spartan, TheLAO, Ideo Ventures, Hypersphere, and Selini capital, while attracting more than 60 industry leaders as angel investors.
Behind the choice of both developers and institutions, facing the problems of blockchain development such as complexity, duplication, inefficiency and high cost, how does Enso solve the problem?
From the initial API product, to the Enso Shortcut Engine, and then to the upcoming Enso Network, a decentralized network built on Cosmos where everyone can participate and benefit, let us take a look at Enso's specific solution to using Shortcuts as a tool to realize chain abstraction and promote the large-scale adoption of blockchain.
Complete 7 months of development work in 1.5 days, and experience Enso's efficiency firsthand
Based on Enso’s huge advantage in eliminating the complexity of acquisition and execution across multiple protocols, this amazing productivity comparison comes from the real development experience of Enso partners:
Plug is an intent-driven on-chain activity automation platform that aims to build a Web3 version of Zapier, supporting users to manage, write, schedule and execute all on-chain activities on its platform.
Before cooperating with Enso, OnPlug spent seven months on protocol integration development. The tedious and repetitive integration work consumed a lot of energy. After cooperating with Enso, OnPlug rebuilt the entire integration layer and completed the workload of the past 7 months in just 1.5 days. The leap in development efficiency enables OnPlug to focus more on the automation of Web3 activities, bringing great convenience to users.
In addition to improving development efficiency, Enso is also very good at handling complex on-chain DeFi execution. The pre-deposit market Boyco launched by Berachain has attracted widespread community participation. As the supporter behind Berachain Boyco, Enso has also been highly praised:
We know that the demands in the Boyco market, from single-token deposits to multi-token strategies, are very complex. Manually integrating protocols, creating custom code for each market-specific need, and conducting extensive testing and auditing would undoubtedly be inefficient and costly.
Therefore, Berachain has established a partnership with Enso to achieve rapid integration with all major DeFi protocols, ensuring the compatibility of the entire ecosystem. Users can complete asset interactions with multiple protocols through a single transaction within the Boyco application, without having to switch between multiple platforms or search for the best way to obtain the required assets. This brings a more seamless participation experience and lays a good foundation for the launch of Berachain's mainnet.
As of this writing, Boyco TVL has surpassed $3.1 billion, with support from Enso Shortcuts.
In addition, Glider, an automated cryptocurrency trading marketplace, provides users with powerful portfolio automation capabilities through Enso; Enso was launched on ZKsync to help developers build faster and more efficiently; Bedrock, a multi-chain liquidity re-staking protocol, has partnered with Enso to bring users one-click exchange and deposit of assets in the uniBTC Berachain vault, etc.
Outside of the DeFi scenario, the combination of Enso and AI is also eye-catching:
As the AI Agent craze continues and the DeFAI narrative rises, DeFi, as a core pillar of the crypto world, is widely favored by DeFAI, which aims to use AI to simplify the complex DeFi operation threshold.
As AI Agents move towards a smarter direction, Enso is committed to helping AI Agents overcome the complexity of interacting with multiple protocols, bundling transactions, and managing operations, giving them stronger execution capabilities:
BrianknowsAI’s integration with Enso allows it to focus more on developing their intent recognition engine without having to worry about integrating with multiple blockchain protocols;
Velvet Unicorn, an autonomous hedge fund management company, quickly built advanced features such as neural network routing and multi-step income strategies through its partnership with Enso;
Hey anon, as an AI Agent focusing on DeFi, interacts with 180+ protocols on the chain through Enso…
There are countless examples like this.
It is reported that Enso has integrated 180+ protocols, of which 60+ apps are using Enso to take advantage of these integrations, and Enso's ecological cooperation map is still expanding rapidly.
Behind the series of successful cases, many people are curious:
As the secret weapon for multiple projects to simplify development processes, improve development efficiency, and provide a seamless experience, how does Enso achieve all this?
From API to intent engine to Shortcuts, let’s take a look at Enso’s product evolution
As the saying goes, practice makes perfect.
Enso did not determine its project development strategy centered on Shortcuts from the beginning. After many attempts and adjustments based on the product in the early stages, as well as the team's long-term observation of the needs of the encryption market, Enso's specific solution to improving blockchain development efficiency gradually became clear.
Enso started with DeFi and previously launched a social trading platform where anyone can create social strategies to monetize their investments in DeFi and ERC20 tokens. However, in the process of integrating more DeFi protocols, Enso spent a lot of time and paid a high audit cost of more than $500,000 for integrating 15 DeFi protocols.
After this, Enso found that compared with specific DeFi products, the market needs services that can solve the difficulties of DeFi development. Therefore, the team decided to rethink the product design and reconstruct the underlying logic of the product. Subsequently, a series of APIs were launched, including Route API, Bundle API, Metadata API, etc., which aim to provide tools for executing and obtaining all relevant metadata of the DeFi protocol, covering multiple transactions in one atomic transaction, bundling multiple DeFi operations to create a custom workflow, obtaining the best route based on a given expected path, and providing all metadata related to the DeFi protocol. Developers only need to call the API to quickly embed on-chain operations into their products, providing efficiency improvements for developers to build the next generation of DeFi.
After the great success of the API, Enso thought deeply about lowering the development threshold: How to further help developers easily build products that can interact with any smart contract on any blockchain framework?
Based on this, in June 2024, the intent engine Enso Intent Engine was officially launched.
As a fully decentralized shared network state, Enso Intent Engine is designed to simplify smart contract interactions on the blockchain and support building tradable data in various blockchain frameworks. This is achieved through a Map of all smart contract interactions in the blockchain framework.
Simply put, the blockchain industry can be likened to the earth. Each blockchain is a country, and the applications in each blockchain are cities in each country. The cities have various facilities such as schools, shopping malls, parks, etc., and the applications include various operations such as lending, borrowing, exchanging, transferring, approving, and depositing.
In the past, countries did not interact with each other, that is, data was not shared between blockchains. If you wanted to integrate a chain or a smart contract, you needed to learn and adapt to follow the laws of the country and city.
Enso aims to draw a global map that records the laws of all countries and cities (that is, all blockchains and smart contracts) and presents them in standardized data formats, transaction formats, and execution formats. In this way, developers can easily integrate through the standardized layer built by Enso.
Therefore, at Enso, developers only need to express their intent to automatically handle complex blockchain interactions, and the intent request does not have to be explicitly targeted at only one use case, it can include multiple smart contract interaction types across multiple blockchain frameworks.
For example, in this shared map, just as we can use the “Park” tag to aggregate all parks in this global map, we can use the “Lend” operation type to collect and analyze data across all lending protocols.
Based on the concept of the shared map of Enso Intent Engine, different operation types can be combined on demand to create a series of Shortcuts that can significantly improve the efficiency of blockchain development, transforming complex on-chain operations into simple, verified and reusable building blocks.
Simply put, the standardized operation types are like Lego bricks, and developers can assemble the bricks into the shape they want according to their own needs. For example, Lego bricks have been combined into pre-built components such as doors, windows, and walls. You can easily assemble these components into any building you like, such as a school, hospital, or shopping mall.
Similarly, developers can combine different operation types to form various Shortcuts such as DeFi routing, asset management, and automated execution, and integrate these Shortcuts into the functional implementation of various products.
Doesn’t this sound simple and efficient?
Currently, Enso has the following Shortcuts:
Token Swaps and DeFi Routing
asset Management
Financial Tools and Automation
DeFi Protocol Integration
Smart Contract Interaction
Complex transaction bundling
At the same time, more shortcuts are in the works. Many projects, including Berachain, ZKsync, and Bedrock, have greatly reduced the time and cost of integration and maintenance through Enso, and have achieved on-chain settlement of more than $16 billion, bringing more liquidity integration, innovative functions, and high-quality user experience to the blockchain ecosystem.
Behind the exquisite product design is the project control of an elite team with 10 years of working experience in the blockchain field.
As CEO and co-founder of Enso, Connor Howe has been working full-time in the blockchain industry since 2016 and published one of the earliest Ethereum research papers in the UK. Prior to founding Enso, Connor worked at Sygnum, a Swiss fully licensed digital asset bank, and established the blockchain department, responsible for the development of fully collateralized stablecoins, tokenization suites, multi-signatures and other products, and managed over $5 billion in assets using original HSM.
Another co-founder, Peter Phillips, is also Enso’s CTO and has also been working full-time in the blockchain industry since 2016. Prior to joining Enso, Peter worked at a blockchain development agency whose clients included DuckDuckGo and Mozilla. He also developed Aragon through Autark and has extensive experience in blockchain development.
Milos Costantini is the core developer and co-founder of Enso. Before joining Enso, Milos built the validator infrastructure for Swisscom blockchain, the largest telecommunications company in Switzerland, and helped establish their blockchain department, making outstanding contributions to building the Enso network architecture.
It is worth mentioning that I believe many community members have noticed that Enso Intent Engine currently provides services in a centralized manner, but Enso takes decentralization as its core vision and aims to build an organic ecosystem where everyone can participate and contribute and everyone can benefit from it.
With the upcoming arrival of Enso Network, the last piece of the decentralized puzzle has been put into place, and Enso’s decentralized network vision is being accelerated.
Next stop: Enso Network: Towards full decentralization
As an independent L1 Tendermint blockchain, Enso Network is jointly driven by network participants to provide efficient execution and extensive integration. We know that "realizing intentions through shortcuts" is the core concept of Enso, and the realization of intentions includes three keys:
Intent expression: The user specifies a desired outcome on the application.
Intent Execution: Solvers compete in an auction to determine the best solution to execute the user’s intent.
Intention settlement: The solver earns profit by providing the best solution.
Enso Network achieves the logical closed loop of its decentralized network by introducing four major roles.
Consumers are the demanders who need to state their desired outcomes and pay a fee to make a request to the Enso network.
Action providers are developers who publish smart contract abstractions on the chain. The network will reward developers who become Action providers based on the proportion of solutions generated using their smart contract abstractions.
Graphers are people who provide solutions based on the needs of Consumers. Whenever a new need arises, Graphers will traverse all contributed abstractions in the Enso network and combine them in the optimal order to generate executable bytecode. As the proposer of the optimal solution, Graphers will receive rewards.
Finally, Validators, as the core of maintaining the security of the network, are responsible for listening to and broadcasting valid requests from consumers in the network, verifying the smart contract abstractions contributed by Action providers (only smart contract abstractions verified by Validators can be used by Graphers to generate solutions), and determining the optimal solution from the solutions of Graphers and feeding it back to Consumers for execution.
We know that the design of the economic model plays a vital role in the stable and positive operation of the ecosystem. The Enso network incentivizes network participants to participate and restrains the occurrence of malicious behavior through the native token $ENSO.
As a key component of the Enso ecosystem, $ENSO has a total issuance of 100 million and has the following key functions:
Gas: Pays for making requests and modifying status on the Enso network;
Governance: Promote governance protocol upgrades through token voting;
Staking: Action providers, Graphers, and Validators are all required to stake a corresponding amount of tokens to participate in network contributions. When improper behavior is discovered, the staked $ENSO will be confiscated. At the same time, coin holders can also delegate stakes to network participants to further maintain network security.
Based on this, Enso's positive ecological cycle, in which everyone can participate, everyone can contribute, and everyone can benefit, is clearly visible on paper.
Conclusion
Of course, while the Enso API is very mature and has been widely integrated into dozens of well-known projects, the development of the Enso Network is still in its early stages.
According to its white paper, the launch of Enso Network will be divided into two phases:
In the first phase, centralized Enso services will coexist with the decentralized network. Developers interested in becoming Action providers can contribute to centralized services hosted by Enso, and independent Validators will simulate bytecode solutions.
In the second phase, Enso Network will gradually transform into a fully sustainable ecosystem. At the same time, the network will provide a completely permissionless participation environment for key network contributors such as Action providers and Graphers. In addition, Enso Network will also expand from supporting only the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) and Move Virtual Machine (MVM) frameworks to further enhance the developer experience of the multi-chain ecosystem.
According to the official roadmap information, Enso Network is currently in the testnet stage and is expected to be officially launched in 2025.
It is particularly noteworthy that although Enso has achieved outstanding results in the application of DeFi, AI and other fields in the past, fundamentally, for those applications that want to interact with smart contracts on any blockchain, they can find the optimal solution through Enso Network.
In other words, the Enso network has the ability to support any type of project. It is not only limited to improving the development efficiency and service quality of applications such as DeFi, but also has the potential to become a universal gateway for all smart contract interactions on all blockchains. As the future trend of multi-chain becomes increasingly clear, Enso will be an effective way to help developers build killer applications that can truly achieve large-scale adoption.
At a time when the number of public chains is surging, DeFi interactions are becoming more complex, and cross-chain demands are doubling, Enso's narrative of improving development efficiency and becoming a universal gateway for all smart contract interactions on the chain is undoubtedly attractive. Its evolution from API to intent engine to Enso Network also allows us to see the project's attitude and thinking of continuous improvement and deepening.
With the upcoming launch of the mainnet and the gradual implementation of various roadmaps, Enso may become one of the key driving forces on the road to large-scale adoption of blockchain technology.
