Just Ship It - Why Enso Built Shortcuts for Developers

Key Takeaways

• Building blockchain products is difficult due to immature developer tools, fragmented ecosystems, costly security audits, and extensive integration requirements, significantly slowing innovation.

• Initially a DeFi social trading app, Enso faced severe integration challenges and high audit costs. Recognizing these universal pain points, they pivoted to creating infrastructure tools that simplify blockchain integrations for other developers.

• Enso offers "Shortcuts," pre-built modules enabling easy integration of complex blockchain actions (e.g., swaps, loans) via APIs. Underlying this will be the "Enso Network," a unified execution layer orchestrating these shortcuts across multiple chains. Enso Network is expected to launch its mainnet in 2025.

• As the testimony to the success of Enso, it has powered integrations like Berachain's $3B pre-vault, Boyco, and AI-driven autonomous agents (Virtuals' GAME). Their ultimate goal is to make blockchain development as seamless as Web2 development.

1. Intro: The Challenges of Building a Crypto Product

1.1 We Are Early: The Dev Tools in Crypto Are Not Mature

Building a blockchain-based product today remains notoriously difficult. Despite the buzz around composability, the developer experience is far from mature. Web2 developers benefit from polished frameworks, standardized APIs, and cloud services, but in crypto, the tooling and infrastructure are still evolving.

These barriers manifest in multiple ways. A recent Enso blog described the situation bluntly: “The technology for building on blockchain is broken.” This strong statement highlights the fundamental pain points developers face. Creating a crypto application requires overcoming a mountain of technical challenges:

• Developers must become proficient in multiple blockchains and environments, navigating the fragmentation of the blockchain ecosystem—with hundreds of chains and Layer 2s, each built on different technologies.

• They need to write and deploy complex smart contracts for core application logic.

• Maintaining integrations with countless other protocols adds another layer of difficulty.

• Every line of Solidity code must undergo costly security audits before it can be trusted.

As a result, a significant portion of development time is diverted from building user-facing features to constructing backend infrastructure to be composable with other protocols.

Crucially, these challenges aren’t just theoretical—they directly slow the pace of innovation.

Source: Building on Blockchain is Broken

1.2 Projects Addressing the Difficulties

Implementing composability is challenging due to cross-chain interoperability, infrastructure management, and the time-consuming nature of manual integration. However, several projects are addressing these pain points by abstracting complexity, enabling developers to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure.

Here are some notable examples:

• Aggregators like LiFi provide cross-chain bridging and DEX aggregation through a single SDK/API. With connectivity across 20+ networks and optimized routing for the best rates, LiFi has been integrated into major wallets like MetaMask and Robinhood Wallet, enabling seamless cross-chain swaps for millions of users.

• Enso has developed a platform with its “Enso Shortcuts” for multi-chain and multi-protocol interactions. Developers can execute complex cross-protocol actions as a single intent request, eliminating the need for multiple individual integrations. With over 75 projects utilizing its infrastructure and facilitating $15+ billion in transaction volume, Enso enables teams to build applications in days rather than weeks.

By abstracting complexity through developer-friendly APIs and infrastructure, these projects allow teams to focus on innovation rather than reinventing the wheel. Notably, Enso has made composability its core mission, making it easier for developers to implement. Let’s explore how they started and what they offer.

2. Enso's Journey on Defining the Problem

To understand Enso, let’s examine its journey from building a DeFi application into building an infrastructure solving challenges in composabiliy. Their journey highlights a principle in building a successful product: the tools you build to solve your own problems can sometimes become more valuable than the original product itself.

Instead of starting with theory, they encountered real integration challenges firsthand while building their DeFi application, developed solutions for themselves, and then packaged those solutions for other developers. This section explores how Enso's journey has now come to provide the development shortcuts it offers.

2.1 The Enso Way - Their Beginning

Source: Enso Network

Enso began by solving their own problem. Their tesimony on their website illustrates the challenges they faced, how they started, and what they're doing now.

We know the pain of building onchain products ourselves — so we built ENSO for builders like us.

In 2021, we worked on our first product.

We built, we integrated, we audited. Months of work. Hundreds of thousands spent.

When we finally launched, not enough users cared.

Our problem wasn't the idea; it was building itself.

Endless audits. Manual integrations.

Time wasted on everything but product, distribution, and community.

So we built Actions and Shortcuts first for ourselves:

No more integrations.

No more maintenance.

No more distractions.

Just speed and focus.

— Enso

Enso originally started as a social trading platform for DeFi, allowing users to create and share complex trading strategies. They secured funding and spent a year developing the protocol. However, the product failed, and they encountered the full weight of the difficulties in building a dapp. The reality was sobering: launching the product demanded over a year of development and more than $500,000 in smart contract audits.

Every new feature required weeks or months of wrestling with different codebases, liquidity pools, and contract nuances—followed by costly security audits. Enso’s engineers had to manually integrate dozens of DeFi protocols, writing custom smart contracts for each strategy while ensuring security at every step. The integration overhead was enormous—every new feature meant months of painstaking development, only to be followed by expensive audits.

Ultimately, they came to a realization: their social trading app wasn’t failing because the idea was bad. Instead, the engineering effort to maintain it was unsustainable, delaying them so much that the market had moved on.

2.2 The Pivot: From DeFi App to a Developer Platform

Enso’s second phase began with a critical realization: the very challenge that had hindered their original product—the difficulty of integrating multiple protocols and keeping pace with rapid industry changes—was a problem faced by every blockchain developer.

In 2023, Enso pivoted. They transformed their application into a DeFi “super app”, internally integrating over 50 different DeFi protocols into a single interface. This was a herculean feat, proving a crucial point: with the right architecture, it was possible to combine dozens of on-chain services within one product.

Their new aggregator-style app allowed users to interact with yield farms, swaps, lending platforms, and more—all in one place. Crucially, Enso’s team developed internal tools to streamline the process of adding each new protocol, applying lessons learned from their earlier struggles.

The pivot began to pay off. Other teams and developers took notice, asking how Enso had managed to integrate so many protocols so quickly. After all, what had taken Enso months could take others years of development.

The founders saw a bigger opportunity: instead of being just another DeFi app, Enso could offer its integration framework to all developers.

Source: Building on Blockchain is Broken

2.3 Building the Platform: From Internal Tools to an API Product

In mid-2023, just weeks after receiving interest from peers, Enso launched an API service that allowed external applications to leverage its unified DeFi integrations. In other words, they turned their platform inside out—exposing the engine they had built for their own product as a service for others. This marked the birth of Enso’s core offering today: a developer platform designed to make on-chain integrations plug-and-play.

What makes Enso’s approach unique is that its solution emerged directly from its own struggles. The team’s journey—from building an over-engineered product to creating a streamlined integration service—exemplifies the mantra “Product Beats Paper.” Enso’s founder, Connor, often repeats this phrase to emphasize that delivering real, working products is far more valuable than writing whitepapers or theoretical designs.

Source: X (@connor_enso)

By late 2023, Enso had secured total $9.2M in funding backed from major investors like Polychain, Multicoin to pursue this vision, and their infrastructure was already trusted by over 60 projects. In short, Enso shifted from building a single application to building the infrastructure that can power many applications, allowing other teams to avoid the same pitfalls Enso encountered. It's a classic pivot: solve your own pain point, then offer that solution as a product. Now, Enso is helping developers "just ship it."

3. Enso’s Answer After the Journey - Shortcuts and then Network

Enso's answer to the integration nightmare is encapsulated into two steps: Enso Shortcuts and the Enso Network. Together, they form a developer platform that makes integrating blockchain protocols dramatically easier. In essence, Enso Shortcuts are the building blocks – the high-level actions and integrations that developers can grab off the shelf – and the Enso Network is the engine under the hood – the infrastructure that stores data, and executes those shortcuts across multiple chains and protocols. By understanding both, we can see how Enso abstracts away much of the complexity that previously plagued blockchain development.

3.1 Step1. Enso Shortcuts: Plug-and-Play DeFi Integrations

Source: Shortcut to Enso

Enso Shortcuts are designed to be exactly what their name suggests: shortcuts for on-chain development. A shortcut in Enso’s terminology is a pre-built, reusable module that performs a complex on-chain operation with a single call. The idea is similar to how modern app developers rely on third-party APIs or SDKs – for example, using Stripe for payments or Google Maps for location – instead of coding everything from scratch. Enso provides a catalog of on-chain actions (swaps, deposits, loans, yield optimizations, NFT trades, and more) that have already been integrated, tested, and abstracted behind a clean interface.

This approach allows developers to compose applications by combining shortcuts, much like assembling lego blocks, rather than reinventing the wheel each time.

“Want to add token swaps across multiple protocols? There's a shortcut for that… Need to integrate lending? We've got you covered… Looking to automate a complex DeFi strategy? Just plug it in.”

— Shortcut to Enso

Source: Introduction to Enso – Enso Docs

Enso has developed shortcuts covering a broad range of use cases. According to their documentation, the shortcuts span token swaps and DeFi routing, asset management actions, treasury management tools, lending/borrowing integrations, complex transaction bundling, and more. Each shortcut encapsulates all the low-level steps (contract calls, approvals, validations) needed to perform a higher-order task.

For example, a “yield farming deposit” shortcut might automatically handle approving a token, swapping it for another asset, and then providing liquidity to a yield farm contract – all in one atomic sequence. For the developer, this is exposed as one API call or one function in the Enso SDK. Enso’s own journey proved out their reliability, processing over $13 billion in on-chain transactions by late 2024 through these very integrations.

The impact of Enso Shortcuts on developer efficiency is dramatic. To give a sense of scale: one team, Plug, spent seven months building complex integration logic for their Web3 automation product, only to replace it completely in 1.5 days using Enso Shortcuts. Another project, Glider, was able to deliver portfolio rebalancing and automation features in days using shortcuts, whereas doing it manually would have taken them months and deep expertise in numerous protocols.

3.2 Step2. Enso Network: Shortcuts, Accelerated

3.2.1 The Role of Enso Network

If Shortcuts are the books for the implementations, the Enso Network is the bookshelf—the underlying engine that enables them to function seamlessly across different blockchains and protocols. Enso has built a specialized network that maps every on-chain interaction to a shared, unified environment.

Currently, the network, which is now in a testnet phase, is implemented as an L1 blockchain using the Cosmos SDK, specifically designed to process and store data to solve the intent with “Shorcuts.” An intent represents a developer’s desired outcome—such as “swap 100 DAI on Arbitrum for ETH and lend it on Compound on Ethereum.” The Enso Network is responsible for orchestrating calls to the necessary protocols to fulfill that intent efficiently. This architecture transforms the traditionally fragmented blockchain landscape into a shared network state, where Enso maintains a unified representation of smart contract capabilities across multiple chains.

Source: Network Intro - Enso

Diving into it, Enso Network acts as a shared network state which effectively decouples the what from the how in blockchain interactions. Developers specify what outcome they want (their intent), and the Enso Network determines how to execute it across the necessary chains and protocols.

When an intent request is submitted, Enso’s specialized network participants handle the execution process. First, they retrieve on-chain data, such as user balances and market conditions. Next, they determine the most efficient execution path using Enso’s predefined Shortcuts. Finally, they compile an executable transaction (or batch of transactions) that automates all the necessary steps, ensuring dependencies like prior approvals and liquidity constraints are accounted for automatically.

For instance, if an intent involves executing a multi-step DeFi trade, the network will fetch price quotes, check available liquidity, generate the optimized transaction sequence, and return a ready-to-run bytecode that the user or application can execute on-chain. This automation dramatically reduces complexity hasefor developers and users alike.

3.2.2 Enso Network’s Next Step

As of early 2025, the Enso infrastructure operates in a semi-centralized manner. The centralized API service is live, allowing developers to integrate Enso’s capabilities as a hosted service, while the decentralized version, the Enso Network is still in testnet. Developers are noe building on the API version, which serves as a preview of the full decentralized network.

Looking ahead, Enso envisions a fully decentralized execution layer powered by a network of specialized participants. The three primary roles in this system are:

1. Action Providers, who contribute new Shortcuts and integrations, expanding the network’s capabilities by publishing standardized playbooks for interacting with protocols.

2. Graphers, who act as solvers, determining the most efficient way to execute intents across chains and protocols.

3. Validators, who secure the network and verify the correctness of execution, ensuring integrity and reliability across the system.

This design creates a marketplace of solvers and integrations, enabling the network to expand as new DeFi protocols and strategies emerge. With this infra, Enso Network aims to be the backbone of blockchain applications, allowing them to perform complex multi-protocol operations safely and efficiently. By standardizing and simplifying how different blockchain components interact, Enso’s ultimate goal is to unlock true composability—enabling any application to integrate any protocol, on any chain, through a unified interface.

4. Case Study on Boyco: How Enso Powered Composability

Let's examine how Enso enabled composability for various protocols. Many projects have integrated with Enso, including:

• Bedrock (One-Click Deposits): Leveraged Enso to allow users to deposit any token into vaults in a single transaction, eliminating manual swap steps.

• Hey Anon (AI DeFi Agent): Integrated Enso's shortcuts so AI agents could execute cross-protocol DeFi actions.

• Loomlay (AI Agent DeFi Actions): Enabled AI-driven no-code DeFi strategies by providing instant access to multiple protocols via Enso.

• Infinex (Onchain CEX-Alternative): Powered its swap feature through Enso, allowing frictionless trading.

• Dinero (One-Click Staking & Withdrawal): Simplified staking and unstaking by allowing users to deposit or withdraw with any token, with Enso handling the swaps and staking.

Notably, the recent integration with Boyco on Berachain represents Enso's most significant case study. By integrating major Berachain DeFi protocols, Enso enabled seamless composability for builders and processed over $3.1 Billion within days. In the next section, let’s explore how Enso managed this impressive volume.

4.1 Berachain’s Predeposit Vault - Boyco and Enso

Berachain has successfully integrated Enso's infrastructure for Day 1 liquidity as part of its mainnet launch. Throughout the pre-deposit campaign, more than 130,000 unique wallets interacted with Boyco vault contracts. Each vault represented a specific dapp's market. The campaign featured over 100 different liquidity markets available for deposits, with contract addresses representing both single-sided vaults (requiring one asset) and dual-sided vaults (requiring two assets).

Source: Boyco Markets

A key infra that made these complex interactions possible was Enso's shortcuts, which consolidated and automated transactions for users and developers. Enso Shortcuts allowed multi-step processes like token approvals, strategy deposits, and LP token staking into single transactions. All deposits were processed through Enso's router contracts, which interfaced with Stakestone, Lombard, Etherfi, and other protocols on users' behalf, significantly reducing complexity. The workflow of Boyco was like below:

1. Protocols set up markets on Boyco, defining specific on-chain actions

2. Liquidity providers committed assets and negotiated terms

3. Assets were secured in pre-deposit vaults

4. At mainnet launch, Enso's shortcuts automatically transferred assets to each smart contracts of the dapps

Source: Royco Integrates Enso to Power Boyco Berachain Launch

The scale and mechanism of Boyco's liquidity pre-deposits were first of its kind. While previous projects have employed lockdrops and incentive programs to attract liquidity, none have matched Boyco's $3B+ coordinated deposit initiative and automatic distribution on the mainnet launch.

This strategy effectively solved the cold start problem by ensuring Berachain would debut with substantial liquidity across its DEXes, lending markets, and other applications. The approach eliminated dependence on centralized market makers or post-launch yield farming.

This was possible since Boyco leveraged Enso to automate liquidity deposit execution using Enso Shortcuts. Enso efficiently routes all liquidity to the appropriate protocols, ensuring each dapp receives the deposited funds to operate from day one.

4.2 Powering the Future of AI Agents with Virtuals Protocol

GAME will be the open communication standard for the Agentverse. Agents will be able to communicate, transact and exchange services with each other autonomously, enabled by the open-source GAME framework.

— GAME - Enabling agent-to-agent interactions

Virtuals’ GAME is a framework that allows developers to build autonomous AI agents capable of advanced interactions within the blockchain ecosystems. These agents learn from past experiences, adapt dynamically, manage crypto wallets autonomously, execute complex tasks across multiple platforms, and deliver engaging user experiences.

Virtuals integrated Enso’s Shortcuts into their GAME (Generative Autonomous Multimodal Entities) agents, enabling AI-powered onchain execution. This integration allows GAME agents to interact with over 200 onchain protocols without support from actual human.

Source: X (@virtuals_ai)

Enso’s Shortcuts specifically enable GAME agents to perform complex multi-step DeFi transactions—such as swapping tokens, depositing assets for yield generation, borrowing stablecoins, and reinvesting into additional strategies—all within a single transaction. This allows AI Agents to be terminally onchain without any barriers. Additionally, smart routing and gas optimizations are automatically handled for bundled transactions.

Consequently, Virtuals' GAME agents can autonomously execute onchain DeFi strategies with instant efficiency. This represents a crucial milestone in fully autonomous onchain execution for AI Agents, while positioning Enso as the driving force behind this economic ecosystem.

5. Looking Ahead: Just Ship It

Enso’s product now lets developers “just ship it”—bringing ideas to market quickly and securely—an essential capability for all crypto apps, given the rapidly shifting sentiment and the industry’s open nature. As it expands beyond an API service to a standalone mainnet, its capabilities will grow with more integrations and efficient execution strategies.

Enso’s “shortcuts” empower teams to build products that seamlessly combine different blockchain ecosystems without the hassle of manual integration. The ultimate goal? Making blockchain development as accessible as web development. As Enso puts it:

"Mass adoption won’t come from just better blockchains or faster networks. It will come from making blockchain development as accessible as Web2 development."

-- Enso

At the core of Enso’s approach is the founder’s mantra: “Product Beats Paper”—a challenge to the traditional cycle of lengthy whitepapers preceding product releases. Instead, Enso prioritizes usable, working products, accelerating adoption and creating a virtuous cycle of growth.

By helping developers focus on shipping real products, Enso is positioned to help crypto finally deliver better products.

Resource

• Berasearch 🐻⛓ on X: "Enso x Boyco - Powering the Largest ever Chain Bootstrapping Event with Intents" / X

• Enso - Alea Research

• [OurNetwork] DEX Aggregators by volume 🏦 + Enso