DAPPCON 2025: Shortcut to Building on Chain - Connor Howe

Transcript

Hello. So, web 3 development is fundamentally broken. I'm Connor how the co-founder of Enso. I've been building full-time on chain for the last 9 years starting in 2016. Enso has built two consumerf facing products and pivoting it into infrastructure that allows people to build applications really quickly and easily on chain. The agenda of today's talk is to give you a bit of context of developer tooling of web 2 and web 3, an overview of Enso, who uses Enzo, and then how Enso really is a power the engine that powers web 3. If you're

building a product, whether you're in web 2 or you're in web 3, what really matters is being able to go to market, validate your product, get users, and then get more users through distribution. If you're building successful startups, you don't spend years theorizing or theoreticals. You simply experiment, you fail, you learn, and you do it all over again. Similar to what the CEO of Coinbase said, action produces information. Just keep on doing stuff and you get more information. In the web tour world, this is completely true. We have teenagers, we have children, we have adults, hobbyists developing applications over the weekend. You may not know, but Zapier,

one of the largest automation tooling in web 2, was built over the weekend. It's a multi-billion dollar company. The famous game that we all know and love back in the day, Flappy Birds, was built by one developer in 3 days. And in crypto, we have no apps. We have over 4.7 million applications in the web 2 world and we have a measly 4,800 because we don't have any tooling. The web 2 world has tooling for developing games such as Unity engine, Unreal Engine where you can code and create the visualization.

In designs, you have Figma, you have Sketch where I can create a component and then people can reuse this within the websites as well. For websites, you've got Wix, Framer, Infra, you have Versel, Netlify. Regardless of what these tools do, they have three core components in common. Being able to reuse what you've built, i.e. I create an item in a game, maybe it's a health portion. Somebody can then reuse that in their application as well. There's sustainable marketplaces that live on top of all of these tooling. I can sell the rights to be able to use that health potion within my application. And also, it's not just about money. People like the social recognition of being able to

create something and other people use this within their products. And I fundamentally think as an industry we are so misguided and we've been misguided for years and we need to change our thought process if we want people to use crypto holistically and to use this technology. We don't need higher TBS. We don't need higher block sizes. We don't need more storage. We don't need X Y and Zed narrative that you will be sold over and over again. Whether your blockchain has 10 million TPS, whether you have mega decentralized or the big big blocks, if you have no applications on your on your chain, you have no users. Thus, you're a

ghost chain and you're fundamentally vaporware slashit fraud in my opinion. So, in theory, in web 3, we should have more applications. We're permissionless. We don't need licenses. We don't need approval from the app store or the Google Play Store. But it's the complete opposite because we're incentivizing the wrong behavior and we have no abstraction tooling that web 2 offer. In web 3, as a developer, you're being asked to build the Ethernet cables that connect all of the internet together.

Before you could even start testing your idea and your product, you have to integrate each chain manually. You have to understand the underlying programming language, whether that's Solidity, Rust, or Move. You need to build your onchain contracts to integrate those protocols. You need to know auditors. You need to get these audited. You need to integrate indexers. You need to raise private money. You need to integrate RPC endpoints. And what this all really results in is you're spending half a million dollars before you can even test your idea. It's broken. How many blockchains do we think there are? From 0 to 50. Raise your hand.

50 to 100, 500 plus, 1,000 plus. Okay, so everyone's around 500. There's over a,000 blockchains. I was astounded whenever I saw this. It's nuts. Why do we need a thousand blockchains? We don't. Let's be real. There's over 43 million smart contracts that live on Ethereum alone. Just for developing a product on one chain, you're having to spend six to eight months and half a million dollars before you can test your idea. Again, web 3 development is broken. And this is where ENSO comes in. We allow you to focus on what matters, which is product, community, and distribution. We've

tested our theory of people developing their applications over the weekend. The probability of having 4.8 8 million apps versus 4,800 of what's going to get normal people to really use this technology. We need to get into that space. So the web 3 Zappier automation tool called unplug built their MVP without Enso in 7 months. They rebuilt all of their integration suite in a day and a half. If we can play the video with sound. I sent it. You don't have it.

Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I sent it earlier. Tell me if you can't do it and I can move on. Oh. Uh, you should have a YouTube link. It's a screenshot. You need to go YouTube. Right, let's continue. If you get a video up, just start rolling it. So, Enso has over 100 plus enterprise companies using us in production. We've enabled over 15 billion on chain. We have over 60 million requests per month.

We have over a, 1,900 hobbies developers using us on a day-to-day basis. Don't trust me. Look at the stats and look at the people that are using us. The fundamental issue of this industry is being able to read and write on chain. Whether you're building a project with an AI real world assets, whether you're launching a new chain like beer chain that fully relied upon our infrastructure for $3.1 billion in 3 days or your crosschain dexes, asset management NFDs you get the point, right? The fundamental issue is how do you read and write on chain and then so can solve this for you. Like I said, don't trust

verify. UniS swap worked with us. We powered the bar chain launch of 3.1 billion Stargate layer zero and the whole shebang. ENSO is infrastructure that allows you to focus on what matters which is your community distribution and your product. You may have not heard us about about us before and that's fine. But you may have heard of some of the launches and that's our infrastructure underneath that can allow you to really focus on your product. Whether you're a large enterprise or you're a hobbyist developers, you really should have this response which is l that was so easy.

This is one of the largest protocols in the whole space that I can't mention the name that will go live this week. They have tens of billions of TVL. They wanted a feature using Enso from start to finish in production in an hour and a half. It's unheard of because building Oh, well that's Building onchain is hard due to manual redundant integrations. You're continuously integrate maintaining these as well. You have to have this internal blockchain knowledge as well. And every single protocol and smart contract on chain is not standardized. Let's say you want to simply offer lending from morpho a or every single function signature is unique. Every single parameter is

unique. Whereas with enso you can come along and say I want to lend a morpho. I want to lend a and I want to lend on oiler for example. When using ENSO you can access over 250 plus onchain protocols as of today. This is ranging from onchain and off-chain data such as TVL APY logos input tokens output tokens balances. We also offer you the D5 routing and you can combine actions on chain into one simple shortcut. And so it's your shortcut to building onchain applications. What a shortcut really is is saying, "Hey, I want to lend, I want to borrow, I want

to swap, and I want to loop all within one transaction." And we provide that out of the box for you. Now with Enzo, you can really just build a front end. You don't need to care about all the underlying infrastructure that should create this flywheel effect for this industry. But like I said earlier, Ethereum has 43 million smart contracts, over a thousand plus different blockchains. It shouldn't be expected for ENSO developer team to hire thousands of developers to add this into our stack for you to consume. So the way that we kind of scale this which is actually an announcement today is we're starting the first phase of the ENO network where now

if you're D5 protocol or your chain yourself you can now start adding directly to the ENO infrastructure. Similarly how D5 lama operates you add your protocol to D5 lama so you can get visibility of what data is on your protocol. Now with then so you can add your protocol for also data and also execution. That gives you from day one over 100 plus enterprise companies using your product from day one and over 1,900 different hobbyist developers. This is self-service. If you want to add your protocol, you can simply just add it yourself now. You don't need to even talk to us. All of this is powered by

the ENO network. We have three different network participants. One is the action provider which is what we've opened up as of today where you're adding how to interact with particular smart contracts on chain. Whenever a request comes into let's say for example I want to enter into a borrow swap and then re-enter like a loop. These graphers will understand that request and they will combine all of these actions together to give you one call data solution. These people don't care what the data is. They don't care what the request is. They're purely algorithmic guys that build algos to combine things together. Once the solution has been generated, validators will then simulate this transaction and

then this will be given as a response to the requesttor. People don't know this, but we built an open source version of Tenderly. It's called temper. Temper your emotions before it executes on chain. This was used by cow swap for all of their transactions for a number of months. This is a tool that's used inside of here. The response time for this is under two seconds. Sorry, 20 I think it's four milliseconds. Other people have two second response times. It's the best in the industry. What all of this results in is a shared network state. Similar to a world map, right?

World map, you have all the different cities, all the different countries. And right now, as an industry, you have over a thousand chains and there's going to be more chains that grow. And we're expecting developers to understand all of this one by one before they can even test their product. What Enso holistically does is put all this information into one place allowing you to integrate one tool and get access to the whole ecosystem. And product beats paper. Put your money mouth put your put your mouth where your money is. Ship a product. Stop selling narratives. You know what will you build now that you are able to really build only a front end? There's no more excuses. There's no more $40 million

plus fund raise to spend four plus years. You can now build your product and release it really quickly and easily. If you really want to build a DI app, and again I I put my money where my mouth is in 30 minutes. We have a workshop in Yeah. It's 5:45 upstairs. You build a DeFi application from start to finish, crosschain, all of these different executions across over 250 plus protocols. We have a limited amount of t-shirts as well that were only being given out at this workshop.

So yeah, thank you very much and I hope you can see that web 3 development really is broken without ENSO. Thank you. Thank you, Connor.