Connor Howe: Building the Onchain Execution Engine with Enso Network

Join Ashwath Balakrishnan and Neel Daftary as they explore the future of DeFi infrastructure with Connor Howe, co-founder of Enso. After nine years of building in crypto, Connor has created what he calls "the shortcut to building on-chain applications" - a developer tool that abstracts away the complexity of integrating with hundreds of DeFi protocols. From powering Berachain's $3.1 billion launch to enabling developers to reduce build times from seven months to just days, Enso is positioning itself as the Unity engine for Web3.

Enso: https://www.enso.build

🎯 Key Highlights

▸ Connor's nine-year journey from writing Solidity in Mist Wallet to building crypto infrastructure

▸ How Enso powered Berachain's $3.1 billion DeFi launch behind the scenes

▸ Reducing developer build times from 7 months to 1.5 days through abstraction

▸ Why crypto needs more apps (4,800) than blockchains (1,000+) for mass adoption

▸ The "fat engine thesis" - how abstraction layers will control blockchain routing

▸ Enso's upcoming network model: action providers, grafters, and validators

▸ The "Enso Drop" - accessing 370+ potential airdrops through network participation

▸ Security through simulation: 4ms response times vs industry standard 2.6 seconds

▸ Chain abstraction vs. application abstraction: the real path to user adoption

▸ Why product beats paper in crypto's current critical juncture

💡 Subscribe for more crypto & AI insights! 🔔

🧠 Follow the Alpha

▸ Connor's Twitter: @connor_enso

▸ Enso's Twitter: @EnsoBuild

🔗 Connect with Delphi

🌐 Portal: https://delphidigital.io/

🐦 Twitter: https://x.com/delphi_digital

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/delphi-digital/

🎧 Listen on

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/62PR1RigLG2YN5Pelq6UY9?si=18ac7ccf36ab4753&nd=1&dlsi=50105fd66e6c4124

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-delphi-podcast/id1438148082

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Yy99ZlQIX9-PdG_xHj43Q

Timestamps

00:00 — Intro: Connor Howe, Enso co-founder

01:15 — Nine years building in crypto: from Bitcoin to Ethereum

03:00 — Early DeFi development challenges and the birth of Enso

05:00 — Chain abstraction vs. application abstraction philosophy

08:30 — Serving 8% of Web3's developer mindshare (2,250+ developers)

11:00 — Berachain's $3.1B launch: Enso's behind-the-scenes role

13:15 — AI agents, automation, and new use cases emerging

15:00 — Reducing build times: from 7 months to 1.5 days case study

17:30 — Security through simulation: 4ms response times

21:30 — Why we need products people actually want to use

23:15 — New developer onboarding trends and product directions

26:30 — The Enso Network: action providers, grafters, validators

30:00 — Self-service protocol integration and scalability

33:00 — Enso vs. Yearn comparison and strategy differences

35:15 — Network economics and fee distribution mechanisms

39:00 — Upcoming TGE and token utility design

41:00 — The "Enso Drop": accessing 370+ protocol airdrops

42:00 — Developer relations strategy: YouTube, universities, incubators

45:15 — Keeping developers away from crypto Twitter for innovation

47:15 — Fat protocols vs. fat apps: the abstraction layer thesis

51:30 — "Product beats paper" - crypto's critical juncture

Disclaimer

This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

You're now plugged into the Delphi podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

GM everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Delphi Podcast. I'm Ashwat, the head of consulting at Delphi, and I'm joined by Connor Howe, the CEO and founder of Enzo, and Neil, who's a part of Delphi's DeFi research team, and has spent a significant amount of time looking at Enzo and has even written a report about them. If you've been in DeFi, you've probably heard of Enzo in some capacity. They were, you know, a pretty crucial part of BetaChade's boycott rollout, and were pretty much responsible for all of the DeFi execution that happened through that program. But for you know, those who are listening that aren't familiar with with Enzo and with Connor, maybe, you know, Connor, you can kick this off by giving us a bit of an introduction to yourself, your journey through crypto, and how you came about, you know, starting Enzo.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Yeah, for sure. Thanks very much for having me on today. It's a great honor and uh great to work with the Delphi team as per usual. So I'm Connor, the co-founder of Enzo. I've been building in crypto full-time for the last nine years. So I started in 2016. Prior to that, I explored Bitcoin in 2013, was maybe into it for a year, kind of fell off the map a little bit. And then in 2016, I actually found out about crypto from my university professor. So it was my last year in uni. You have to do like a thesis or a uh a dissertation in Scotland, and there was a post about you know Bitcoin. And I approached him and said, You know, I've been using Bitcoin. Um, and he said, Have you heard of Ethereum? I said, No, I haven't. What is this random word, Ethereum? And that really started my journey. So back then I was writing Solidity in Mist Wallet. You know, there was barely any IDE extensions. Mist Wallet was pretty much the first ever wallet for Ethereum, and it wasn't just a wallet that held your crypto, it could also do uh uh stakingslash validation, and you could also write smart contracts inside, and it had a compiler inside, and that's really what started the journey. So we done a I'd done a year um writing Solidity, uh part of university for the thesis. First ever application I created was actually a roulette table. It was a roulette table using Oracle Eyes. Um, Oracle Eyes was before Chainlink, before Redstone, before Pith. It was uh a centralized Oracle provider and it doesn't exist anymore. And I was using that with Wolfram Alpha to generate the randomization. Obviously, it's not secure and it could never be used in production nowadays, but it was a production test. And then I worked for multiple different startups, had my own consultancy company slash developer studio, and then went to join a crypto bank within Switzerland. Uh they're maybe well known, maybe not well known. They're called Cygnum, and I helped build the cold storage, hot storage, secondary exchange, a fully collateralized stablecoin that was recognized by the Swiss National Bank. And during that time, DeFi summer started. You know, I saw early days uh some token economical exploits inside of Balancer, and you know, I was playing very actively inside of DeFi. And during this time, people in the company definitely noticed that I was very active in DeFi and crypto. They were asking me to use their funds and put their money into DeFi protocols to generate them yield on YAM and so forth and sushi, whenever Chef was around back then. And I thought, well, there must be a tool inside of crypto to do this. Um and that's how Enso started. It was a social trading product where I could create a strategy and anyone could create a strategy for that matter, and that strategy would be investing into DeFi protocols, not only buying these tokens, but also lending, borrowing, entering into LP positions, and then the creator would get a percentage of the profits. Now we built this, we launched it, and we actually found that interacting and building in DeFi was really, really challenging. So we pivoted into DeFi Super App. Now we rebuilt all of the smart contract architecture underneath to allow us to access the hundreds of DeFi protocols, then spending over half a million dollars for probably four 13, 14 protocols and audits that we did for V1. Whenever we launched the V2, we found other people had the same issue was how to integrate everything that lives on-chain in our app really quickly and easily. And that's what really started our journey is to what we are today, which uh ENSO is the shortcut to building on-chain applications. And yeah, maybe I can give a bit of an intro of that. Uh you know, there's over 125 plus projects that use us. We've enabled over 17 billion, just about to reach 18 billion. And it's uh yeah, uh one of the most, I would say, the most used DeFi uh tool within all of crypto to start building applications in in DeFi as of today. So happy to jump in more of that later.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Nice. That makes sense. I think you know your background um writing smart contracts in the early days probably fueled a big part of the vision towards what what Enzo has kind of become today, which is kind of an abstraction tool, I guess, for developers. Um something that I've I've been very interested in for the last couple of years is this, let's say, overarching narrative of chain abstraction, or to put it in simple terms, just being able to create layers of abstraction that make the UX for the end user as simple as possible. Um, and you know, just basically push all of the complex stuff, um, you know, the realities of the on-chain world to the to the back, um, somewhere that they can't see it. And I'm curious, uh, you know, like how you see Enzo inside of this bucket. Do you do you see it more of as uh a piece of middleware that that kind of enables this kind of UX to actually become a reality? Or do you think that the the end goal or the the end state um for for Enzo here is to actually become more of an interface itself, more of a front end, or kind of the destination that that users go to when they're trying to um you know like streamline pretty complex transactions?

SPEAKER_02 6:20

It's a great question. Um there's over a thousand plus blockchains that live today. On Ethereum alone, there's over 43 million smart contracts. If we expect developers to choose an isolated chain and to spend months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, we estimate minimum at six to eight months for an MVP to release with a minimum cost of half a million dollars over dev, dev overhead, audit cost, and so forth and so forth. You know, they're not able to really test their ideas and release, right? And we can't be expected as an ecosystem for people to isolate to one chain or just become integration dev shops. You know, it's like, okay, do you want to rebuild AWS? Do you want to rebuild Google Cloud? Do you want to rebuild the Ethernet that connect all of the internet together to be able to build your application? Um, so for us, I think we're a little bit further than chain abstraction. Um, you know, we positioned ourselves as a solver with an intents, and we were like one of the top three solvers. And intents, really, for those who aren't aware, intents are just a request. Like, hey, I have this job to be done, and then someone needs to do that job, right? But if there's minimal people that can do that job, then the job's never going to be fulfilled. So we really broke down ENSO in a way that Enso can be used by Chain Abstraction Tooling, and it's already been used by Chain Abstraction Tooling, and it can also be used by intent networks. And ENSO really is the engine that powers all of Web3. You know, I think intents are one, they're doing single chain and also cross-chain. Chain abstraction really, it's a fancier word for what I basically describe as a multicall or multiple API calls. It's like, okay, people are positioning chain abstraction as show me your unified balance across all the chains. It's like, all right, just call DBank's API multiple times of different chain IDs and then just respond as one API call. So ENSO really is focused at the developer level. You know, we have over 2,250 developers that use our API on a daily basis. You know, in the Web3 market, there's only 28k developers. So we have over 8% of the developer mind share or usage already within this ecosystem. Now I think where ENSO is positioned and where it's going to go is a lot greater than probably what we understand as of today. In the Web 2 world, there's over 47 million uh application developers. You know, if we think crypto has reached any mass adoption or any mass usage, quite frankly, we're delusional. Um because we have a minor, minor usage of developers compared to web 2 developers. Um, so do I think the final narrative of ENSO is intense chain abstraction for this ecosystem and us? No, not at all. I think we're a full application developer tool, um, similar to an engine. So Unity is an engine for building games. Um, you also have Framer for websites, you have Vercell. You know, we're the engine that allows people to build Web3 apps. Um that's the way that I really would position ourselves. So we want to stay away from the interface side. Um, we do build many products on top of our own tooling because one, we understand it really well and we see what people need. You know, since we communicate with so many projects in this space, there's so many problems still unsolved. And you might have seen a release called One Stable. You know, it took us like a couple of weeks, like one, one and a half devs to do it, and now we have tons of stable cars using it. So um we want to stay more in the infrastructure side, but to dog feed, we need to also show the innovation and the ideas that can be built using Enzo.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

You mentioned like how a lot a lot of ways in which you think about Enzo is very similar to how web to development works. And one thing that you kind of usually come across is like the number of clicks that a user needs to do to kind of get the task that they want to get done. Right. In crypto, potentially when I'm doing a transaction which involves a bunch of chains, there's probably like tens of clicks that I need to do. Um, so everyone's more or less aware about like how you guys have done the Royco campaign, but I was very curious to understand like what kind of uh things our developers built in which you guys were able to abstract like potentially like 20, 30 clicks that a user would initially have to do into something which is like a single-click strategy for them. So like cases where the value prop from Enzo is the most relevant and where the complexity has been reduced the most?

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Yeah, it's a great question. And maybe I can give you a bit of insight on the Boyko-Royko stuff for Bearchain. You know, the one of the largest DeFi launches and chains of this whole cycle, um, they had an incentive mechanism for depositing funds on Ethereum, and those funds needed to be migrated from Ethereum to Bearchain and then executed into all of the brand new protocols that didn't exist up until the chain was live. And somebody has handled all that execution underneath. And these executions were you know not just swapping from token A to token B, we were bridging, then lend, then borrow, leverage loop, then enter into one-sided LP, so forth and so forth, right? This was handled fully by Enso. Um, not many people know this. Uh, they assumed this is Roy Call, they assumed it's Boico. That really is just an interface. It was all of Enso's logic underneath. And we safely and securely moved over $3.1 billion into over 80 plus unique different D5 combinations. So I think that was a a really, really um pivotal moment in in Enso's like history to show the power of one of our team, two of the capabilities that people are doing that powered like the largest chain launch for DeFi this this whole cycle. Um, the other ones that are being done, you know, obviously Plume uses us for their portal, Optimism Super Stacks, and so forth. But I think what I find the most interesting is that Enso is an engine that addresses one key problem, which is how do I read and write on-chain through Wunto? Because you've got the graph, which is on the reading side, on the execution side, you have a couple of tooling, but they're nowhere near us. We combine this all within one. So that core fundamental problem is like, how do I read and write on-chain? So the amount of use cases and the amount of different projects that can use us is pretty infinite, to be honest, if you want to interact on-chain. But to be very clear and concise, um, a lot of AI tooling are using us. So a lot of AI agents, you know, you might know about Virtuals, you might know about uh Hey Anon, Al Almanac, um Automato, um all of the leading ones where the execution engine underneath. On the other side, you have um yeah, intent networks are using us chain abstraction tooling like infra inside of infra. We also have wallets, so you've got places like Infnex and large names that are also coming out shortly. You also have LSTs, LRTs, so for example, Etherfy, Inception, then there's also another large LST that's going live with us shortly. Then there's one key area that I think in crypto that people have kind of forgotten is automation. So automation of your DeFi positions or just reading and writing on chain or doing web through transactions based upon off-chain data. So, like, hey, if X and Y token DPEGs, like USTC, DPEGs, then do all these actions. Like exit all my portfolio associated with that, or exit all these uh DeFi protocols that have USTC in the pool or paired. Um that's what we found to be really, really interesting recently because that's not been possible up until Enzo. We have a project called Onplug. They were they built their MVP without Enso, I believe it was seven months, and then we approached the team and said, Hey, you know, you're building really cool stuff, like you're building Zapier drag and drop automation and crypto, and it's never been done before. Why don't you just use us and get access to all of on-chain through One Tool? And they were able to rebuild all their integration suites in a day and a half, you know. They reduced the development timeline from seven months to a day and a half. Now, what I do find interesting is the use cases that we see day to day, it changes. Like it's a very unique position that we're in, that we're able to see the new ideas because we're a generalized tool that allows you to read and write on chain. So if there's a new primitive that comes out in like three days, like we're still positioned for that. It's not that we've made a bet to say we're only helping lending markets. You know, we even have lending markets that do repay and borrow on one transaction or they do cross-chain deposits to repay and borrow and leverage loop. Um, so I think the use cases it will be coming is just completely different. And I think the only way to be able to get to that position is again reducing people's developer time from seven months to a day and a half. You know, if you can have that innovation that Web2 developers currently have, where they can build an app over a weekend and release it and be like, hey, do people like this? Do they not? Like, I don't need to raise five million in a seat to just test an idea, and at that point you've run out your money and just launch a token. Um, like Flappy Birds was built over the weekend that generated 50k revenue. That was a viral, viral game. Zapier was built in three days, multi-billion dollar company. Um, so to answer your question concretely, it's really DeFi right now. Whereas we also have automation of any Web3 transaction, we also have NFT protocols using us. Now, what other primitives do you have outside of crypto that are like that? Sure, you've got RWAs, they're also using us. Sure, you've got Deep In, they're also using us. What's the new trend that will come in a week? Well, we don't know, but we're positioned in a way that they can still use us for that. So it's a fortunate position.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

No, that that makes a ton of sense. I think the the way I think about it is, you know, like coming back to sort of this this point of like DeFi adoption. I I do agree with you that, you know, we're nowhere near um anywhere close to like being um on the on the mainstream side of adoption, seeing like a critical mass of people come over. Um I think what you're talking about here is sort of one side of the equation where it's like, how do we enable people to be able to build apps quicker and to just iterate and you know, like get you know their ideas out there and and figure out what it is the market wants. Um, but I think the second part of that is probably more so on you know, like the perception around securities with with smart contracts. Uh a lot of my friends who are you know probably been in crypto at this point for like anywhere between like three to six years, um, I I do see a lot of hesitance even from these people when it comes to like interacting with with your smart contracts, you know, like just the sheer amount of money that's been lost to to hacks and exploits and vulnerabilities is is pretty mind-boggling. And I know, you know, like part of uh the way you guys look at Enzo is is that you know, like there's a security aspect here, there's a security benefit to you know like using Enzo as as kind of middleware. And so I'm I'm curious how you think about you know, like like this this kind of narrative, this this side of the equation, and I guess uh a larger question of like what's missing from the existing security landscape that is actually gonna get more people to be comfortable using on-chain apps in their day-to-day lives and just like on a more regular basis.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Yeah. So in terms of the smart contract side, I agree. One thing to know Enzo has been around for four and a half years, and we've never had one exploit. You know, not one. We've handled over 17 billion dollars. We've done, I believe, as of to date, I think there's 10 audits publicly. I might be wrong, I think it's 11. You know, for a team to do 10, 11 audits, it's kind of unheard of. So the way that we kind of view this is our view in the future should be never write a smart contract again. A developer that is in the web 2 world that wants to interface on-chain, they don't need to understand smart contracts, and they do not need to write smart contracts that interact with smart contracts. If you write a smart contract that interacts with another one, that's creating another layer of security issues. You know, people talk about these vaults, right? These vaults, then you need to have an adapter contract. This adapter contract needs to then interact with the base contract. You've actually added two other layers of security concerns and potential vulnerabilities into your whole system. Now, with ENSO, you can avoid those two steps beforehand and just interact directly with the protocol. So whenever people do make requests to ENSO, we'll directly communicate with those protocols on chain and generate the bytecode off-chain. Now, what that allows us to do is be really quick and very responsive by simulating every single request that's being made. So if somebody makes a request to us, we're able to run this call data on what we call uh like a simulation fork. It's basically a full-on replication of Ethereum or whatever chain that may be, and then run against it and then see what happens, right? Does it fail? Does it not fail? What's the gas cost? Is there any unexpected behavior like approvals that were made to other contracts that shouldn't happen? Because the transfers to EOAs was the transfers to contracts that aren't in a whitelist, right? You can have all of these additional security mechanisms off-chain. What that uh is not just ours, our simulation tool. So we created one called Temper, we open sourced it. Uh pretty viral, it's got 300, I think, 60 stars on GitHub. It was used um by Cowswap in production, Yairn, Gelato, Genosis Pay, and a bunch of other teams. Like even chains forked that tool and used it as their internal simulation tool for their new chains. Um it's really, really good. Um so we know that our infrastructure is bulletproof. And to give you a bit of a context on the speed, you know, our response team, our response time for simulations is four milliseconds internally. Um, other teams are doing 2.6 seconds. Um, so the infra is really, really bulletproof. But as a as a secondary fallback, we also use uh Tenderly, for example, to also simulate these transactions. And by you not needing to write smart contracts for all these integrations, you don't need to then communicate with auditors, you don't need to raise large amounts of funds to be able to then audit these. And again, let's say you're a web 2 developer and you want to get into web 3, you know, you don't know who the good auditors are. You may think Certic is a good auditor, but they're not, right? Like you shouldn't be using them. But if you Google audits and smart contracts and you're new to the ecosystem, you might actually put trust in that firm, which you shouldn't put. Um, yeah, some sparks are opinionated from my side, you know, whatever. Um, so yeah, so the reality is you know, it's it's more secure doing this mechanism, and what you're saying is like what people need for more day to day to use crypto. Um Brutally honest, uh, we need products that people want. Um, you know, the same money that cycles through DeFi, it's all the same people. Like you see money going TVL up or TVL down there. That's because this is backroom agreements of hey, I want this APY or I want this extra yield that's not public, and I'll put $500 million in your protocol. It's just the same people using it. So I think what we need to do for more people to use crypto is one, give products they actually want to use, and two make it seamless. Like they shouldn't need to care about chains, they shouldn't they don't care. Like if you go to TikTok or Instagram, you're not saying, yes, I will use the Google cluster that's based in Japan or in Munich. Like you're not specifying that. That's what we're asking people to do. And on the security side, do you just have a certain degree of knowing that something is going to work, right? And their funds are not just going to be rocked left, right, and center. And I think that is on the application that is presenting the information to the user for making the choice of what is a safe protocol and what's not a safe protocol.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Got it. Very curious to kind of float from you. I think like since you guys are working with like thousands of developers that are kind of coming onto the platform, using the APIs, like what direction do you see the new kinds of products being built out in Trypto? Because from the lens that I observe things, you look at the Solana ecosystem and you see like a lot of mobile apps kind of coming around. But when you kind of look at the Ethereum ecosystem, that is no longer the case. Um it's still kind of desktop app heavy. Um at the same time, like do developers mostly come to Enzo because they want to create certain DeFi strategies that are available with like a single or a few clicks. Just want to understand like the developers that are kind of being onboarded to crypto right now through Enzo, what kind of apps are they looking to build? Is it in the consumer space? Is it in the DeFi space? Like, what's what's happening on that side of things?

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Yeah, um, so for example, well, for the majority of it is people wanting to interact with DeFi. Why do they want to do that? Because that's kind of what's mainly used. Now, the DeFi segment that can be broken down, you know, the stable coins are using us. Like Reservoir went live with a multi-chain bridging solution and also execution of one transaction. Then you also have the automation that uh they're basically creating triggers to be able to do certain actions. You've got DeFi portfolio management tools. A lot of these people are not building mobile apps, um, they're building tooling for the money that already lives in the ecosystem. There's a large, large neo bank that you know I I can't mention here that we're we're in discussion with that uh will enable, let's say, millions and millions of users outside of crypto to actually interact with crypto. I find that very interesting because that's the bridge between the web 2 world and the web 3 world. Um there's some other there's some other like new primitives that are just being built. For example, these new Vault as a service, they're then using us underneath, right? So the variety really just goes high and large. You know, you've got DPM projects that are using us for fetching data on-chain and also writing on-chain based upon what the information is off-chain. You've got um RWA projects like Plume, they're using us for interacting with all the protocols that live on their chain through their portal, um, with kind of the the real-world assets being involved inside of there. So, you know, to be very concrete here, a lot of it is DeFi um because that's where the money is today. Um, do I see people really experimenting in new consumer grade products on a mobile phone? We've got a couple of people doing that, but really it's is is heavily desktop inspired.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

No, that makes sense. I think the average crypto user is probably more of a desktop person than mobile, but it's been interesting to see, you know, like certain apps, I guess, like like Phantom especially, um, do so well, you know, like in the more traditional app stores. And, you know, like that sort of acting as this wedge uh for people to sort of get onboarded into crypto. But I kind of want to, you know, like uh change the direction of the conversation a little bit and direct it more towards um the actual tech, I guess, like the the inner functionings of of Enzo as a network. And so right now the way it works is there are like three key stakeholders. You have action providers who create the shortcuts that users use, you have the graphers that create the routes that you know like these actions are going to take for a specific user, and then you have validators who you know just to sort of make sure that that everything's running right. I guess like the network's currently in a bit of a permission state. And uh, I guess like the ideal end state is you know, there's a piece of transaction fees flowing through to to each of these different stakeholders as they you know do their jobs, uh, and you know, like they're they're getting paid for their contributions. And and so I'm I'm curious what uh you know all of this looks like behind the scenes right now and what it's going to evolve to as Enzo moves into a more permissionless state.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

Yeah, I I'll even like give some context as to why we're doing the network. Um, you know, I think a lot of crypto projects, and people are gonna disagree with me. That's your own opinion. Um, I think crypto projects decentralize far too quickly without finding product market fit, without finding a real use case and solving a real problem in this ecosystem. Now we made that active decision that Enso will not launch a token up until we have product market fit and we're generating revenue, right? Now, what we found very quickly, like I was trying to describe before, is people want to use Enso for completely different things, right? And if we envision that this is the new internet, that everything lives on-chain, they need to get access to all this through one tool, which is ENSO. It doesn't scale for us as a team to build every single integration that lives on-chain and understand it and add it to our actions. And for further context, actions are basically they're how to standardize interacting with a protocol. So let's say you have a lending protocol. Generally, you have like key functions like put my money in, lend, uh, withdraw, take my money out, uh, borrow, and then certain assets and kind of weights and so forth. And that's generally the basis of a lending protocol. Um, sure, they've got different mechanisms and designs underneath. And each protocol has different ways of how to interact with that. But as a developer, you don't care. You just want to say, hey, I want to lend a Morpho, lend an Avi, lend an Euler, and so forth. So with actions and standards in Enso, you can come along and say, hey, uh Avi.lend, Morpho.lend, um, and yeah, so forth, then Euler.land. Now, where that context comes into play is we allow people to contribute to the Enso network. So we've already seen like people come to us and they're like, hey, I want this, I want that, I want that. Like we're a team of 19 people and we can we can go pretty fast. But if we get Enso to be using, you know, there's 47 million developers in web 2 that we need to add everything manually, the company's done. Like it doesn't make sense. Like they need to get everything straight away, they need to have everything available to you so that network allows people to contribute to it. So if you're in your protocol and you want to get access to over 125 protocols that use ENSO, you can just, whenever you deploy your protocol, just add it into ENSO so that you already get all that distribution channel, and then you can get exposure to all these new developers. So this is where the network comes into play, where we have action providers, you can envision these as developers or even protocol developers, and they add how to interact with the protocol, like AVI, Euler, Morpho. Then you have graphers. Let's say somebody says, hey, I want to do this really complex strategy where I want to lend, I want to borrow, I want to loop, then I want to take that token, I want to enter into another vault with these tokens. I want to then take this vault and put it in single-sided LP. You know, to be able to combine all that and that logic as a developer, it's quite complex. So this is where graphers come into play. These are guys that will look at the whole NSO map, we call this as a map, of all the actions and start combining them together, like Lego blocks. Once that's been combined together, validators will then simulate this and say, okay, this is what the person requested, this is what's been made by all these individual parties of graphers. That by the way, they they don't care what the data is, they don't care about what the integrations are, i.e., how to build it. They just bundle it together. And then the validators make sure that this runs correctly. They simulate this, they send a request back to the individual that made the request with all the information associated. Now, by doing this, it really allows us to scale. It allows us to have everything available in crypto under one hood. You know, maybe there's a new chain that gets deployed and you want to deploy it and have it available through Enzo on day one, right? Self-service now, um, which gets very, very interesting because I believe we are probably one of I believe there's another team called Hyperlane that's you know figured that self-service out for chains and cross-chain. And we figured this out for cross-chain, on-chain actions, all under one hood for executing on-chain and also data, right? Whereas intent networks have assumed that solvers, an intent network like you know, CowSwap, you make a request, you've got these individual parties called solvers, they do all of these functions. They do the action provider, they do the grapher, they do the validator. And because we ran top three solver, we saw we're like, hey, some people are really good at certain parts. Like some teams are really good at adding a new protocol. Like they're there within like 15, 20 minutes of it going live. They've got scrapers on chain, it's listened to new contracts, new funds being deposited into it, new volume that's being done. They're really smart at that. Oh, there's also this really smart mathematician, PhD guy, that is able to do incredibly complex algos. And everyone's trying to learn from this. Oh, there's a really good team that's built simulation infrastructure, and there's some teams that haven't even built it. So why don't we just separate all these roles together and put it behind one network? And yeah, by doing this and following this, this really allows us to have everything available through through one tool. It's uh it's a scalable infrastructure to allow us to be yeah, there for every single new thing that comes to crypto.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

It makes sense. Uh, one brief follow-up I have is, you know, like I think people from the 2021 era will probably, to a degree, try to liken this to like when Yurn launched. Um launched to like a lot of fanfare, everyone loved Andre. But then eventually what happened there was like this thesis that people are going to come and basically build out strategies and build out vaults, and this is gonna grow to you know, like multi-billion TBL eventually didn't exactly play out. And I can see, you know, like some people making a case that that this is, you know, this has analogs there. I I think you know, like my view is probably that um it's it's a lot less opinionated than a strategy, um, like creating actions, and then it's kind of on the user to to string it together in a specific way. But I I just kind of wanted to, you know, like like address that, bring that up and see if you had any thoughts um about you know, like being being compared to that era of of you know like strategy and outsourcing, you know, like the creation of actions and strategies.

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Yeah, I mean Yaren is like, yeah, like you were saying, somebody needs to add the actions, somebody needs to then combine it all together, and then wrap it in a vault, get that audited, and then also the routing algos for then combining that in to then execute it and also rebalancing ours is like individual components, right? And then it all can be put together. I think the the the main comparison to this, too, main comparison. I would say look at the graph. The graph worked, people were able to create uh uh standardized ways for fetching data on train. Now, does it really have the same weight as it maybe did three years ago? No. Do I think the largest comparison to us right now is actually on the on the metaphorical level is DeFi Llama. So if you're if you're a protocol or you're in DeFi, day one launch, you have to do a PR to their GitHub to get distribution and to get awareness. It has become the de facto standard for this industry. So why do we not have a de facto standard for whenever you deploy on chain, you want to have distribution of execution and how to read data as a developer. That's where Enzo comes in. So, you know, the argument I would really say there is you know, if you have the argument, have that argument, but then look at all the PRs on D5 Lama, you know, just for fetching data.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Got it. So Conan, I'm I'm very like interested in understanding one particular aspect of Enzo Network, which is like how do the economics of the network work? Right? Like you have action providers, you have graphers, like potentially what's the source of fees coming in into Enzo and between like action providers and graphers, how are these fees distributed? And like the reason that I want to understand this is like we'd seen very recently around, I think, HCC, that a lot of these solvers on CalSwap and on a lot of these other networks are not really profitable. Right? Um, the thing is people will participate in the network as long as it's profitable to like you show them the incentives and they'll show up. So just want to understand like on the volume that is moving through Enzo, what's the take rate that Enzo as a protocol makes? And once, let's say, the permissionless network is live, how will the distribution of these rewards look like? Like how much is going to the action providers versus how much is coming back to the protocol? Uh, just want to understand how the economics of the network would look like.

SPEAKER_02 36:19

Yeah, I think it's a very good point. Um I think there's also another component to mention here is you know, to add something to the network, it doesn't need to be the protocol themselves, it could be any developer. So in terms of that level, a protocol logically, common sense approach would say they want to add it to ENSO, not for the fees, but to get all of these other applications using their protocol by using ENSO as a distribution channel. Hey, I have a new landing protocol, I do a PR and I add it to Enso Network. I now have 125 apps that can use us. They choose by hundreds of thousands of users. So there's that element of like protocols already reach out to us and they already do PRs to our internal repo to add their protocol. In terms of kind of the whole mechanism design, you know, I think early stage network, we're obviously going to have some learnings of how this is fully going to operate. The way that a request is being done, you make a request to ENSO, the actions that are contributed and used inside of that request, you get a portion of the fees. The graphers, you're all competing with each other. So let's say there's 10, 15 graphers, we all have like different concepts or different ideas with the same outcome. Then, based upon that, if you get chosen, then you'll get a portion of the fees. And then, similar to the validators, the validators at the beginning um is heavily incentivized from inflation of the network. Um, why? Because we need to bootstrap all these ecosystem participants to join the network. So the fees that we are generating, uh, we've not publicly said the number, but it's um, you know, it's definitely multiples of our current burn rate per month, which is higher than I think a lot of projects that even generate in a year. Um, and we're generating that in a month. And hopefully in the future, this fees can start going directly to these ecosystem participants. On day one of network itself, it'll be it'll be inflation. Um, once the fees start coming to play, we'll be having an auction, a mechanism where these fees will be going into a pool and people can then come with the NSO token and say, I will pay X amount of NSO token to get access to these fees. So similar auction as how Injective done this, right? Injective said all the fees that we're generating this week come along with injective tokens, and then the the tokens get burned in the background. So that's kind of where we took heavy inspiration from that.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

That makes sense. Uh I I think Connor, there's something that you know probably a lot of people are thinking about, uh, but that you're thinking about quite a bit yourself, which is Enzo's upcoming TGE. Um, I was wondering if if you know you'd be able to share some some details on maybe what the the Enzo token is going to be look like, um, how you guys are thinking about you know the utility design space and value accrual for um for the token. I know value cruel, it might be a little too early to you know like start making definitive statements on that. But yeah, I would just I think everyone would love to learn more about you know like how you guys are uh approaching TGE and thinking about the token.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

Yeah, I think it's a unique opportunity on this podcast to also leak some alpha. Um I will say after the generic uh overview of the token functionality, but we're happy to start announcing today something related to the token as well. So on day one of NSO token, it's primarily used as the security mechanism of the network. So by generating all this call data, you know, there's security benefits, but there's also security disadvantages. You know, if we are the only party that is validating that this can be executed and there's no malicious call data or execution inside of this, you know, we are susceptible to spanner attacks, the team, essentially. Um, whereas what we've done now with the network is everyone runs these simulation tools independently. So we're not the single party that can dictate is this safe or is this not safe? So that'll be kind of the first one. Now, users are able to go there, they're able to secure the network, they're able to delegate to these participants as well, and there's obviously rewards associated. And the second component is also governance. Now, what is a very interesting concept that again we're actually saying for the first time in this podcast, closer to TGE, and there'll be more announcements on it. We're calling something the Encil Drop. Now, the name might change actually in the next couple of weeks, but this is what we have internally so far. Where we're in a very unique position that we have so many protocols that use our protocol. So we have 125 plus, I believe it's even 130 plus now. You can access over 250 plus on-chain protocols. Now, we interact with air contracts and we get airdrops. So we're able to now start offering to the users that secure the ENSO network by delegate staking them their ability to claim other airdrops. Now, I believe this is one of the largest mechanisms in the whole space if you're able to get access to over 370 plus potential airdrops of all of these new innovations that all have really large VC funding. Um, so I think that is another dimension that people should definitely um account to securing the ENSO network of what projects are using ENSO and kind of what that could entail in the future.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Yeah, there's a couple of things that you mentioned throughout the pod that kind of just stayed with me. And like I just want to have an additional discussion on a couple of those. Like one thing that you did mention was like anytime someone who's coming in from Web2 searches for an auditor may just come across someone who's not a great auditor. Right. And so, and also like Enzo, as you mentioned, Enzo and just crypto apps in general are like in like the early innings of their growth. Like, there is so much room to grow. I just want to understand like what kind of things are you guys at Enzo doing to like in improve the visibility of Enzo or any great developer product, like Web2 Devs which are coming into crypto, because I think like that is a major distribution strategy and also is going to be game changer. So, when a potential new Web2 Dev is coming into crypto, like what channels should they be looking at, or how are you guys tapping into these developers so that we have apps which do not look the same as the apps that we've been using for the last five years?

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Great question. I I don't I don't think I have the full answer, to be honest. We're still figuring it out. Um, you know you know, I was trying to think the other day, well, what we've done inside of our developer relations whole strategy and kind of go to market on this. It's like where did we all individually learn about how to build code? Um the reality is it's YouTube. Um it's YouTube. That's where people go and they watch it. How many web 3 companies do you do that you see that actually have not all like wait, let me rephrase. Every web 3 company has YouTube videos and you have zero distribution, right? Zero. Where do people go to learn? They go to YouTube, they go to Code Academy, they go to Udemy, they go to coding bootcamps, coding tutorials, and so forth. So we're fortunate that we also know people inside of the web to developer relations communities that have a large, large, large YouTube community. They have hundreds of thousands of devs. Now imagine if you just had somebody saying, How to build a smart contract, how to build a blockchain application, right? And now you've got your access to millions of viewers that were learning how to build Rust or how to build with JavaScript. You know, it's that similar model. Um, you've the Code Academy tutorials, you've got uh let's say if there was a way to kind of get inside of there and so forth. So that's kind of one area that we're doing. Two, a lot of projects are joining incubators. Now, if we work directly with incubators, we also get that distribution channel as well. I think there's a large community inside of university clubs as well. You know, skyscanner is a massive tool now. I remember my uni days, skyscanner was at a uh came to our university and had a booth. And I went up and I was like, what's skyscanner? And they told me what skyscanner was, and it's a multi-billion dollar company. That's how I learned about Skyscanner. So if there was a way to get into the universities and just so happened that you learned about Ethereum at particular universities, and then starting there's already blockchain courses, the end so was to also be there and also be part of the blockchain clubs. Um is a big, big alpha, to be honest. Um, probably shouldn't have said that in the podcast because our competitors will copy us, um, but you know, um that's that's that's kind of a way to get it into normal people. Now, how to flourish and create the ideas? Um, you know, I I think you can't. Um you've got to keep them far, far away from the crypto, the crypto industry. Um, you've got to keep them further away from crypto twitter as possible and because they will just recycle, recycle, and recycle. Um, they need to really come up with their own innovative ideas. Like I wasn't on crypto Twitter back then, 2016. I was like, oh, let's do a decentralized roulette table, you know, uh Rubet nowadays, pretty much to some degree, right? Um, so I think keep them far away from crypto twitters for as long as possible and just have really good mentors that can support them on their developer journey. In terms of good auditors, bad auditors, um obviously all of this is objective and not opinionated. Um, I mean there there is a certain degree of like how many hacks have happened on certain auditors, and we have chosen a three three three uh three triangulation approach because each auditor has different qualities. So, for example, ABDK we work with who've done Uniswap, they've done many other top-tier projects, they're very good on the cryptographic side, right? Then you've got mixed bytes, they're very good on the cryptographic and the architecture. Then they've done Lido, Curve, and so forth. And then you have chain security that has basically got the whole spectrum inside, and that's like the closing checkbox of all of it. So I would say if any new developer is listening to this, yeah, just come up with an idea and just build it. Like, you know, CT might not like it, but CT doesn't we're not knowing on CT targeting mass adoption right now, let's be honest, is all being recycled.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

No, yeah, I think I think that all checks out. Um, I think, yeah, our our final question for you to kind of you know like wrap all of this up is you know, you're you you seem to be very opinionated about the way crypto is kind of going, and I think that's a fantastic thing. I think all of us are, and if you aren't, you're you're doing something wrong. And so I'd I'd love to hear from you, you know, on kind of this this idea of uh, you know, like the fat protocol versus the fat app. If we look at crypto today, um, and if we look at crypto in 2021, you know, like 2021 is kind of looked at as the L1 cycle. Four years later, um, I would say at least, you know, like VCs and crypto investors still very much overindex on L1 launches. Um, that's what people care about, from you know, like the the institutional market participants to all the way down to, you know, like the smallest retail ones. And so, you know, as someone who's worked very closely with apps and is, you know, actively dedicating their their life to you know like helping crypto break and break past this, you know, like this barrier that that we've kind of set up in terms of like, you know, like how difficult it is to build new apps. Um I'm I'm curious how you think we actually, you know, like break the chasm into a more application-dominated landscape and and how we we actually have, you know, like I guess what what some people would call like a cabinet explosion of of consumer apps instead of crypto and people doing real things instead of just L1 after L1 after L1.

SPEAKER_02 48:34

Yeah, it's a complex topic. Um truthfully, I think it's easier to sell a narrative of a layer one than it is of an app. Why? Because that's what some people can understand. And you're like, okay, so Lana can say, Hey, we're better than Ethereum. We have larger TPS, you know, it's an easy target. You know, Ethereum created something unique, and they were they even took a target as well. They targeted Bitcoin, they said, Hey, we've got Turing complete blockchain, you know, everyone takes a target so that people can have that comparison in their mind, right? So I think the the layer one theory it works, and I think it only works right now because people are not building apps that don't care about all of the chains. Now, once you get to a point where chains, the way and who they're built on top of, or the apps who they're built on top of, it doesn't necessarily matter, and the user doesn't even know where what app or what chain they're using, like that premium is just gonna go um to some degree, right? You're obviously gonna have the VCs that just want the pump, um, because you can get the pump on the later ones. Um on the app side, I think how to break that uh thesis. Um you the people need something to use, they need a product that's useful. Um, and to build useful products, you need to ship fast and really test and see what people use. So, you know, I think if there's only as of today 4,800 apps inside of crypto and there's 1,000 blockchains, you know, you need more apps. I think the real value capture will be the fat engine thesis, which I've just made up on the spot, is is ENSO, you know. Um, if you're able to be that connectivity glue and that one tool that abstracts all of it away, you know, it's it's it's the superpower if you have tens of millions of apps that are building atop of you, right? You know, we could in theory dictate in the future, you know what, if uh base doesn't don't give us incentives, we won't route people to base. You know, I'm not saying that we will do that, but you know, these abstraction layers will ultimately have the control over the chains because similar to you know tools like Turtle Club, right? They're able to create uh a DeFi UI, dictate terms for better terms for liquidity on the DeFi protocols that want it. And if they don't get the terms, then they're not gonna do it, right? Um, so I think ultimately the more higher that we go up in the stack, um, the less control that that the chains will have, and these abstraction tools will actually have a lot, a lot uh more control than they will because you can just direct it away from them. So um, yeah, I'm looking forward to when people actually can build applications and we actually have real-world people using crypto and not just saying for seven, eight years mass adoption, mass adoption, mass adoption, and but actually useful products and people can uh can get used technology.

SPEAKER_01 51:32

I think that's a great answer. Um, Connor, uh always a pleasure to to chat and and thank you so much for for making the time and and coming on uh the podcast. Um any any last thing you would you would like to leave uh the Delphi pod listener with? I I think you've you've dropped a pretty significant amount of alpha here today, but yeah, maybe I'll just prod you for for one last drop.

SPEAKER_02 51:55

Oh, the drop? Is that was that the alpha? Um maybe um well, yeah. I mean, honestly, I think our phrase that we really believe in is product beats paper in this industry. Um this is something I really stand by. If you go to my CT, con underscore Enso, you'll you'll see my my core beliefs. Um, this is a lot more than just Enso for me. Um, this is more about this industry is at a critical point of failure and where we are all being recycled, the same bullshit, narrative garbage. And if we don't get out of this and we have real people and real builders and real apps in this industry, yeah, we failed as an industry. So for me, and that's the whole passion between myself and also the team is that we need real products to build on crypto. And I've been building nine years on chain. I I see the key problems, and so do our developers. So this is a a nice ending point that product beats paper.

SPEAKER_01 52:50

Love that, love that. Again, thank you so much for for hopping on, Connor.

SPEAKER_02 52:55

Thanks for having me, guys.