Connor Howe: Building the Onchain Execution Engine with Enso Network

Transcript

You're now plugged in to the Deli podcast. >> GM everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Deli podcast. I'm Ashwat, the head of consulting at Delphi and I'm joined by Connor how the CEO and founder of Enzo and Neil um 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. Uh if you've been in Defi, you've probably heard of Enzo in some capacity. they were, you know, pretty crucial part of BetterHe's boycode roll out and were pretty much responsible for all of the DeFi execution that happened through that program. Uh, 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. >> Yeah, for sure. Thanks very much for having me on today. It's a great honor and uh great to work with the Deli team as per usual. So I'm Kau, the co-founder of Enso. I've been building in crypto full-time for the last 9 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 uh 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. MissWallet 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 staking/v validation. And you could also write smart contracts inside. And it had a compiler inside. And that's really what

started started the journey. So we done a I 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 relette table using Oracleize. Um Oracleize was before chain link before Redstone before PT. It was a a centralized oracle provider and it doesn't exist anymore. And I was using that with wolffra alpha to generate the randomization. Obviously, it's not secure and it could never be used in production nowadays, but it was a a production test. And then I worked for multiple different startups, had my own consultancy company/developer

studio, and then went to join a cryptobank within Switzerland. Uh they're maybe wellknown, maybe not well known. They're called Signnum. And I helped build a cold storage, hot storage, secondary exchange, a fully collateralized stable coin 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 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 set 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 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 D5 was really really challenging. So we pivoted into D5 super app. you know, we rebuilt

all of the smart contract architecture underneath to allow us to yeah, access the hundreds of DeFi protocols, then spending over half a million dollars for probably 13 14 protocols and audits that we did for V1. Whenever we launched the V2, we found that 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 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 u yeah one of the most I would say the

most used defy 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. 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. Uh something that I've I've been very interested in for the 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 you know create layers of abstraction that make the UX um for the end user as simple as possible. um and you know just basically push all of the the complex stuff um you

know the the realities of the onchain 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 you know inside of this bucket. Do you do you see it more of as a piece of middleware that that kind of enables this kind of UX to actually become a reality or or do you think that the the end goal or the the end state um for for Enzo here is is to actually become more of an interface itself, more of a front end or kind of the the destination that that users go to when they're trying to um you know like streamline pretty complex transactions.

>> Yeah, 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 6 to8 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 in 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 Ethernets 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 oursel early as a solver with an intent 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 inel really is the engine that powers all of web 3. You know I think intents are one they're doing single chain and also crosschain chain abstraction really it's a fancy word for what I basically describe as a a multi call or multiple API calls is like okay people are positioning chain abstraction as show me your unified balance across all the chains. is like all right just call debanks API multiple times of different chain ids and then just respond as one API call. So ENO really is focused at the developer

level. You know we have over 2,250 developers that use our our API on a daily basis. You know in the web 3 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 um 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 Versel. You know, we're the engine that allows people to build web 3 apps. And that's the way that I really would position ourselves. So we want to stay away from the interface side and 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 that 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 the innovation and the ideas that can be built using Enzo. uh you mentioned like how a lot a lot of ways in which you think about Enzo is very similar to how web 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 Royo campaign but I was very curious to understand like what kind of u things have 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.

>> Yeah, it's a great question and maybe I can give you a bit of insight on the boy royo stuff for bar chain. you know the one of the largest DeFi launches and chains of this whole cycle um they had had an incentive mechanism for depositing funds on Ethereum and those funds needed to be migrated from Ethereum to be bare chain and then executed into all of the brand new protocols that didn't exist up until the chain was live and somebody has to handle all that execution underneath and these executions were you know not just swapping from token A to token B they 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 ENO um not many people know this they assumed this is royo they assumed it's boy that really is just an interface it was all of ENO's logic underneath and we safely and securely moved over $3.1 billion into over 80 plus unique different DeFi combinations so I think that was a a really really um pivotal moment in in ENSO's like history to show the power 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 onchain through one 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 fundament mental 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 virtual, you might know about Hey, Anon, Al Almanac, um Automato um, all of the leading ones. We're the execution engine underneath. On the other side, you have um, yeah, intent networks are using chain abstraction tooling like infra inside of infra. We also have wallets. So you've got places like Infinex and large names that are also coming out shortly. You also have LSTs, LRTs. So for example, EtherFi, 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 um is automation. So automation of your D5 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 USDC dp pegs then do all these actions like exit all my portfolio associated that or exit all these D5 protocols that have USDC 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 ENSO. We have a project called unplug. They were they built their MVP

without Enzo I believe and it was 7 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 in and crypto and it's never been done before. why don't you just use us and get access to all of onchain through one tool and they were able to rebuild all their integration suites in a day and a half you know they reduce the development timeline from 7 months to a day and a half now what I do find interesting is the use cases that we see dayto-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 primitive that comes out in like 3 days like we're

still positioned for that. It's not that we made a bet to say we're only helping lending markets. You know, we even have lending markets that do repay and borrow in one transaction or they do crosschain 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 7 months to a day and a half. You know, if you can have that innovation that web 2 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 5 million in a seed to just test an idea and at a point you've ran 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 3 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 web 3 transaction. We also have NFT protocols using us. Now, what other primitives do you have outside of crypto that are like that? Sure, you got RWAS, they're also using us. Sure, you got Deep, they are 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.

>> 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 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. Uh 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. 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 I do see a lot of hesitance even from these people when it comes to like interacting with with newer 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 mindboggling. 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 a larger question of like what's missing from the existing

security landscape that is actually going to get more people to be comfortable using onchain apps in their day-to-day lives and just like on a more regular basis. >> Yeah. So in terms of the smart contract side, I agree. One thing to note, ENS has been around 4 and a half years and we've never had one exploit, you know, not one. We've handled over $17 billion. 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 two world that wants to interface onchain, 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 bite code offchain. 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 train 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? Was there transfers to EOAs? Was there transfers to contracts that aren't in a white list? Right? You can have all of these additional security mechanisms offchain. 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 cow swap in production. Yarn gelato gnosis 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 4 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 two 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 there. It's opinionated from my side, you know, whatever. Um so yeah so the reality is you know is it's more secure during this mechanism and what you're saying is like what people need for more dayto-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 AP PY 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. You shouldn't they don't care. Like if you go to Tik Tok or Instagram, you're not saying yes, I will use the Google cluster that's based in Japan or in in Munich. Like you're not specifying that. That's what we're asking people to do. And on the security side, they should to 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. >> Got it. Very curious to kind of learn 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 crypto? Because from from the lens that I observe things, you look at the Salana 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.

Uh it's still kind of desktop app heavy. Um at the same time like two developers mostly come to Enso because they want to create certain D5 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 Enso, 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? >> 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 they're using as us like reservoir went live with a multi-chain bridging

solution and also executional 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 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 deepen projects that are using us for fetching data on chain and also writing on chain based upon what the information is offchain. You've got um RWA projects like Plume they're using is us for interacting with all the protocols that live on their chain through their portal um with kind of the 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 the mobile phone? We've got a couple of people doing that, but really it's is heavily desktop inspired. >> No, that makes sense. I think the the average crypto user is probably more of a 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 in the more traditional app stores and, you know, like that sort of acting as this wedge uh for 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 um who you know just sort of make sure that that everything's running right. I guess like the the network's currently in a bit of a 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 um and you know like they're they're getting paid for their their contributions and and so I'm I'm curious what you know all of this looks like behind the scenes right now and what it's going to evolve to as Enzo you know moves into a more permissionless state. 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 going to 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 it active decision that and so

we'll 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 Enoil 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 oiler, and so forth." So with actions and standards and ENSO you can come along and say hey avi.land morpho.lend um and yeah so forth and oiler. Now where 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 a new 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 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 Avy, Oil or 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 into singlesided 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 ENO 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 how to build it. They just bundle it together. And then the validators make sure that this runs correctly. They simulate this. to 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? It's selfservice now. Um, which gets very very interesting because I believe we are probably one of I I believe there's another team called Hyperlane that's you know figured that self-service out for chains and crosschain and we figured this out for crosschain onchain actions all 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 cow swap 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 listen 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 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 a it's a scalable infrastructure to allow us to be yeah there for every single new thing that comes to crypto. >> That makes sense. Uh one brief followup I have is you know like I I think people from the 2021 era will probably to a degree try to liken this to like when you're launched. Um you're 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 and basically

build out strategies and build out vaults and this is going to grow to you know like multi-billion TVL 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 analoges there. I I think you know like my view is probably that uh 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 about, you know, like being being compared to that era of of, you know, like strategy and outsourcing, you know, like the creation of of actions and strategies.

>> Yeah. I mean 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 two main comparison I would say to look at the graph. The graph worked. People were able to create uh standardized ways for fetching data on train. Now does it really have the same weight as it maybe did 3 years ago? No. Do I think the largest comparison to us right now is

actually on the on the metaphorical level is DeFi Lama. 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 deacto 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 ENSO comes in. So you know the argument I would really say there is you know if you have the argument have the argument but then look at all the PRs on defy lama you know just for fetching data.

>> Got it. So Connor, 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 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've seen very recently around I think ECC that a lot of these solvers on cow swap 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 too 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 I just want to understand how the economics of the network would look like >> 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 lending protocol. I do a PR and I add it to ENO network. I now have 125 apps that can use us. They're used 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 ENS. So 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 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 to 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 will be inflation. Um once the fees start coming into 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 ENO token and say I will pay X amount of Eno 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 within Injective tokens and then the the tokens get burned in the background. So that's kind of where we took heavy inspiration from that. That makes sense. Uh I I think Connor, there's something that you know probably a lot of people are thinking about uh but 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 and value acral for um for the token. I know value control it might be a little too early to you know like start making definitive statements on that but yeah I I would just I think

everyone would love to learn more about you know like how you guys are approaching TGE and thinking about the token. >> 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 ENSO 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 um there'll be more announcements on it. We're calling something the ENO 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 onchain protocols now we interact with their contracts and we get airdrops.

So we're able to now start offering to the users to 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 ENO and kind of what that could entail in the future. Yeah, there's a couple of things that you

mentioned throughout the part 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 web two 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 to like weblu 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 web todev 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 5 years. >> It's a great question. I I don't I don't think I have the 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 three company has YouTube videos and they 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 boot camps coding tutorials and so forth so we're fortunate that we also know people inside of the web 2 developer relations communities that have a large large large YouTube communities, 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, 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 ma a massive tool. Now I remember my uni days, Skyscanner was at a uh came to our university. They had a

booth and I went up and I was like, what Sky Scanner? 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 ENO 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 got to keep them far far away from the crypto the crypto industry and you got to keep them further away from crypto twitter as possible. Um because they will just recycle recycle recycle. Um they need to really come up with their own innovative ideas. is like I wasn't on crypto Twitter back then 2016 I was like oh let's do decentralized roulette table you know 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 certain degree of like how many hacks have happened on certain auditors and we have chosen a a three three a three triangulation approach because each auditor has different qualities. So for example, ABDK we work with who've done unis swap they've done many other top tier projects they're very good on the cryptographic side right then you've got mix bites they're very good in the cryptographic and the architecture that 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 no one on CT targeting mass adoption right now let's be honest is all all being recycled >> 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 doing something wrong and so I' I'd love to hear from you you know on kind of this this idea of u 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 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 a Cambrian explosion of of consumer apps instead of crypto and people doing real things instead of just L1 after L1 after L1. >> Yeah, it's a complex topic. Um, truthfully, I think it's easier to sell a narrative of a layer 1 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 the 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 um 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 going to go um to some degree right you're obviously going to have the VCs that just want the pump um because you can

get the pump on the other ones um on the app side I think how to break that c thesis is um 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 a 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 on top of you, right? You know, we could in theory dictate in the future, you know what, if u bass 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 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 in, they're not going to 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, but actually useful products and people can uh can get used to this technology. >> I think that's a great answer. Um, Connor, 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 things you would you would like to leave uh the deli 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.

>> Oh, the drop. Is that was that the alpha? Um maybe. Um what? Yeah, I mean honestly, I think a phrase that we really believe in is product beats paper in this industry. Um there's something I really stand by. If you go to my CT conno you'll see my my core beliefs. Um this is a lot more than just ENO for me. Um this is more about this industry is at a critical point of failure. Um where we are all being recycled the same 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 um 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 9 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. >> Love that. Love that. Again, thank you so much for for hopping on Connor. >> Thanks for having me, guys. [Music]