Connor Howe: Building the Onchain Execution Engine with Enso Network

**Connor Howe** (0:01)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast.

**Ashwath Balakrishnan** (0:07)
GM, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Delphi Podcast. I'm Ashwath, the head of consulting at Delphi, and I'm joined by Connor Howe, the CEO and founder of Enso, and Neel, who's a part of Delphi's DeFi research team, and has spent a significant amount of time looking at Enso, and has even no report about them. If you've been in DeFi, you've probably heard of Enso in some capacity. They were a pretty crucial part of Berachain's boycott rollout, and were pretty much responsible for all of the DeFi execution that happened through that program. But for those who are listening that aren't familiar with Enso and with Connor, maybe, 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 starting Enso.

**Connor Howe** (0:53)
Yeah, for sure. Thanks very much for having me on today. It's a great honor and great to work with the Delphi team as per usual. So I'm Connor Howe, the co-founder of Enso. 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 dissertation in Scotland. And there was a post about Bitcoin. And I approached him and said, you know, I've been using Bitcoin.
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 staking slash validation. And you could also write smart contracts inside. And it had a compiler inside. And that's really what started the journey.
So I'd done a year writing Solidity, part of the university for the thesis. First ever application I created was actually a roulette table. It was a roulette table using Oracleize. Oracleize was before Chainlink, before Redstone, before Peth, it was 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. They're maybe well known, maybe not well known. They're called Signum. And I helped build the code 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. I saw early days, some token economical exploits inside the balancer. And 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 the 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. 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 to hundreds of DeFi protocols than spending over half a million dollars for probably 13, 14 protocols and audits that we did for V1. Whenever we launched 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. That's what really started our journeys to what we are today, which Enso is the shortcut to building on chain applications. Maybe I can give a bit of an intro of that. There's over 125 plus projects to use us. We've enabled over 17 billion, just about to reach 18 billion. It's one of the most, I would say, the most used DeFi tool within all of crypto to start building applications in DeFi as of today. Happy to jump in more of that later.