The story of Enso: 2,000 days of building onchain infrastructure
Enso was incorporated on February 22, 2021 around a simple conviction: financial products could be built transparently onchain, governed by code and designed to last. What that looked like in practice has changed several times since.
The first version of Enso was a consumer social investing application. Today, Enso is the execution layer that hundreds of companies rely on to move capital across onchain finance. The route to this endpoint was not a linear journey. It ran through two pivots, a token launch, billions of dollars of ecosystem volume and hundreds of production integrations.
On August 14, 2026, Enso marked its 2,000th day of building. By then, more than $20 billion had settled onchain through the platform, 350+ enterprise clients had built on it, and the company had raised $14.2 million across multiple rounds. This is how Enso got there.
2021: Enso is founded
Co-founded by Connor Howe and Milos Constantini, Enso's first product was a social investment platform. Users could create shareable investment "strategies", tokenized portfolios that other users could invest in, receiving a representation of their share in the strategy. The goal was to make portfolio management transparent, automated and accessible through onchain infrastructure rather than traditional intermediaries.
Enso attracted institutional backing early, raising its first private round co-led by Polychain Capital and the DFINITY/Beacon Fund, and built a community around the product through guilds, AMAs and a community treasury.
The most useful thing to come out of that period was not the consumer interface. It was the infrastructure underneath it.
2022-2023: the pivot to infrastructure
Building an application across DeFi surfaced a much larger problem. Every product had to interact with a growing number of protocols, assets and chains, each with its own interfaces and execution requirements. Increasingly, a single user action required several transactions to be coordinated together, and every team was solving that coordination problem alone, from scratch.
Rather than keep competing for consumers, Enso turned to the layer of other products needed in order to reach onchain finance at all.
In August 2023 the company announced a $9.2 million seed round led by Polychain Capital and Multicoin Capital. Spartan, IDEO, Hypersphere, Cyberfund, Dialectic and Naval Ravikant also took part, alongside more than 70 angels connected to companies and protocols including LayerZero, Safe, 1inch, Yearn, Flashbots, Dune and Pendle.
Later that month Enso shipped its API and the Shortcuts engine, representing the name the execution engine carried at the time. It turned complex onchain actions into reusable execution flows exposed through a single integration. One application had become infrastructure other applications could build on, and that decision set the direction for everything after it.
2024 to 2025: Ecosystem scale execution
The work shifted from one-off integrations to whole ecosystem events: launches, migrations and incentive programmes, including some of the largest onchain events of the period.
Berachain was the proof. Enso ran execution for the February 2025 launch and handled $3.1 billion of transactions in three days.
Over the same period Enso expanded across major protocols and ecosystems. The company built the Uniswap position migration tool alongside Unichain, LayerZero and Stargate, and powered incentivized launches for Plume, ZKsync and Sonic. By the end of that period Enso had passed 200 protocols and 100 products in production.
What the platform did for those products was simple to describe. A product could use Enso to coordinate the transactions underneath an onchain action without integrating and maintaining each individual protocol interaction itself: moving between positions, sourcing liquidity, swapping assets, crossing chains, or combining several actions into a single execution flow. The user saw the product, and Enso handled much of the complexity underneath it.
2025: infrastructure behind major migrations
Another large deployment came through the migration of liquidity toward Unichain. Enso partnered with Stargate and LayerZero on infrastructure used to migrate billions of dollars of liquidity, which demonstrated another use case for programmable execution: coordinating large, multi-step movements of assets across protocols and chains.
By this point Enso operated behind the moments where large amounts of capital needed to move quickly and reliably: launches, migrations, deposits, cross-chain activity and complex DeFi actions. The company that started by building an investing application was now providing the infrastructure those applications depended on.
2026: from access to execution integrity
By 2026 the market around Enso had changed. Stablecoins, tokenized securities and other real-world assets were moving onchain, and fintechs, asset managers and consumer financial products began interacting with infrastructure that until then had mostly served crypto-native applications.
Enso expanded the platform to support that shift. The 2026 product suite included Enso Execute, Enso Earn, Shield for quote simulation, cross-chain routing and bridge aggregation, a flashloan aggregator, and Grapher for pathfinding across available execution routes.
Access to protocols was no longer the whole job. Execution quality, reliability, pathfinding, simulation and the ability to customize complex onchain flows around the needs of production financial products mattered just as much.
August 2026: 2,000 days of Enso
On August 14, 2026, Enso reached its 2,000th day. By then the company had:
- Settled $20B+ onchain
- Grown to 350+ enterprise clients across wallets, fintechs, asset managers and protocol teams
- Powered major ecosystem launches, including $3.1B through Berachain in three days
- Moved billions of dollars of liquidity in large-scale migrations
- Expanded into cross-chain execution, simulation, liquidity aggregation, yield and real-world assets
- Become the infrastructure underneath financial applications serving both crypto-native and increasingly mainstream users
The products changed a great deal over those 2,000 days: a social investing application, then an execution engine and the infrastructure pivot, then billion-dollar ecosystem launches, then simulation, cross-chain execution and real-world assets.
The problem did not change throughout. Onchain finance is powerful because financial actions can be composed together, and that same composability creates complexity. Enso exists to make that complexity executable.
Five years in, the scale is different from 2021. More assets are moving onchain, more financial companies are entering the market, and more sophisticated products need infrastructure capable of coordinating liquidity, protocols and chains underneath a simple user experience. After 2,000 days, $20B+ settled onchain and 350+ enterprise clients, Enso is still building toward the opportunity that first became visible while building its own application: making onchain finance executable at scale.
Building a product that moves capital onchain? Talk to the team or read the docs.