Setting the Scene

Blockchain technology holds the potential to revolutionize entire industries, yet the barrier to entry for developers remains high. Unlike traditional Web2 development, where frameworks and shared libraries facilitate faster innovation, building onchain has been like assembling a spaceship from scratch.

On-chain development is incredibly hard, with many moving parts, complex smart contract integrations, and a constant battle between fast shipping and maintaining security. These complexities slow down innovation and create significant roadblocks for teams looking to launch and iterate on new products.

Furthermore, the increasing fragmentation of the landscape, led by the emergence of new blockchains, is increasing the need for better and faster ways to connect these networks.

For blockchain ecosystems to scale effectively, developers need to build faster. Currently, too much time is spent on infrastructure management, delaying crucial product-market fit (PMF) testing.

With blockchain adoption still in its early days and protocols competing for traction, reducing time-to-market is more important than ever.

This report focuses on the practical reality of building onchain—what slows developers down, what solutions exist, and how shortcuts like Enso can remove bottlenecks and speed things up.

1. The Struggles of Onchain Development

 As the cryptocurrency ecosystem continues maturing, the areas for onchain development increase, opening up new spaces for opportunities. At the same time, the landscape and liquidity are increasingly fragmented across multiple protocols and networks each with its own consensus mechanisms, block time, smart contract logic, and programming language. Integrating all of these becomes exceptionally challenging for developers, who have to face issues of incompatibilities between integrations constantly.

Developing a product that integrates multiple blockchain applications is poised to encounter multiple obstacles. In addition, the tools that allow developers to link these networks and capture these opportunities are still behind what is traditionally used in Web2 development.

This raises several challenges for onchain development.

1.1 Integration Overhead:

Onchain development involves interacting with various blockchain networks and protocols, each with its own consensus mechanism, smart contract architecture, liquidity models, security requirements, and risk profile.

Developers still rely on writing extensive custom code to integrate each of these networks seamlessly, which is time-consuming and error-prone. The necessity of developing custom solutions has also contributed to a siloed environment with limited interoperability.

The complexities increase proportionally to the number of integrations required and the different programming languages used. As the landscape constantly grows, integrations are expected to become more frequent and complex and require constant adaptation. The job is never fully done, as new integrations are frequently added, and old ones become obsolete and require maintenance. Simplifying the integration process is key to unlocking further composability and interoperability within the cryptocurrency landscape.

Limited development power in a team is currently a significant limiting factor on the amount of integrations teams can devote their attention to, often limiting their implementations. In fact, hiring and retaining developers to build these custom solutions is complex and adds financial strains to companies, with senior developers costing over $150,000 annually.

1.2 Security Risks and Audit Costs

Smart contract hacks remain one of the biggest threats in DeFi. In 2024 only, hackers siphoned over $2.2 billion from crypto platforms. As smart contracts handle valuable assets, security vulnerabilities can lead to catastrophic losses. Hacks come in all forms, such as reentrancy attacks (like the one to The DAO), flash loan attacks (for DeFi protocols), oracle manipulation, and more. A single mistake can be fatal for the future of a protocol. Conducting manual integrations means the development team carries the entire burden of smart contract security.

As a result, before launching their products into production, teams must conduct multiple rounds of auditing, which can cost a sizable part of their funding and significantly delay product launches - security audits can range anywhere from a few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, depending on complexity and who is carrying it out. This becomes incredibly expensive for projects with a large native code base and requires frequent checks to ensure all new integrations do not present security risks. Protocols often also offer sizable bounties to incentivize white hat hackers to report security issues, further increasing costs.

1.3 Slow Time-to-Market

Before launching a minimum viable product (MVP), developers must set up infrastructure, test interactions, and ensure compliance with blockchain standards. Unlike Web2, where developers can quickly spin up an MVP using APIs and SDKs, onchain development is more complex in terms of deployment and workflows, with different iteration cycles, resulting in developers spending more time handling and securing the basic functionalities before testing their ideas in production. Web3 integrations have setup challenges that include but are not limited to node management, bridge integration, data validity, and last but not least, costs. Consequently, setting the necessary infrastructure can mean developers take months and incur significant costs before even testing their concept in the market.

These challenges mean developers face constant opportunity costs: time wasted honing integrations is time that could be spent perfecting the product.

This manifests both economically and operationally.

Developers must constantly balance their time, especially during the early stages of a project. As a result, they inevitably try to strike a balance between the desired integrations, their security risks and costs, and the time it would take to deploy them in a testing environment and later in production. Nonetheless, they should not have to compromise, as these opportunity costs can often pile up as time goes on.

While several tools now exist that can ease the pain of onchain development, major improvements are still needed to streamline onchain development.

2. The Tools Helping Developers Build Faster

New tools to help developers build faster will always be delivered with a slight delay. As blockchains constantly evolve, tools and services try to catch up as well as they can.

Nonetheless, tools and services have emerged to help developers streamline onchain development. In particular, we touch upon:

• Pre-built Smart Contract Libraries and Frameworks

• AI-powered Development Assistants

2.1 Prebuilt Smart Contract Libraries & Testing Frameworks

Building on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) now provides a series of benefits in terms of resources available, thanks to these Web3 native tools that focus on smart contracts. Prebuilt smart contract libraries play a crucial role in onchain development by providing reusable, secure, and efficient repositories for their applications. Testing frameworks provide everything developers need to streamline the process of deploying new blockchain applications.

Some of the most widely used are:

1. OpenZeppelin Contracts: OpenZeppelin’s open-sourced contracts are a trusted and widely-used library for building secure smart contracts, with over 1.5m active contracts and $15.6b in TVL in its contracts. It offers a range of pre-audited templates for common blockchain use cases, including ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, governance modules, and access control mechanisms. Developers rely on OpenZeppelin to reduce development time, ensure security, and avoid reinventing the wheel when creating blockchain-based applications. All of this leads to OpenZeppelin's contracts having over 300k weekly downloads.

2. Thirdweb: Thirdweb provides a suite of developer-friendly tools that simplify the process of building decentralized applications (dApps). Thousands of developers leverage Thirdweb to quickly launch NFT marketplaces, DAOs, and DeFi applications without the need to write complex smart contract code from scratch. This is reflected in Thirdweb’s rating of 4.93 on Product Hunt. By offering customizable, pre-built smart contracts, Thirdweb accelerates the development of web3 projects and makes it easier for developers to deploy scalable blockchain solutions. Users have the option to select a free plan or enrol in a “Pro” plan for $999 per month, suitable for larger teams.

3. Testing Frameworks: These development frameworks make it easier to launch EVM blockchain applications by streamlining the development process from inception to production. In particular, they focus on supporting development with writing, testing, and deploying smart contracts. Hardhat and Truffle are two of the most popular development environments, which are, however, less used these days, with Truffle being sunset.

   
   Among these tools, we find:

• Scaffold, a stack to debug and refine smart contracts to launch production-grade applications

• Foundry (by Paradigm), with over 8600 GitHub stars and 450 contributors. This testing environment is easy to set up and provides native coverage checking and fuzzing for faster compilation and testing than Hardhat.

• Apeworx, a similar framework where users can compile, test, and interact with smart contracts, but it is written in Python and is known for its customizability and security focus on key management.

• Virtual Studio Code, providing plug-ins such as Solidity visualizers, coverage checkers, and smart contract completion.

• Tenderly, a leading tool for transaction debugging and creating a simulation environment, along with other additional debugging and security solutions such as Gelato, OZ Defender, and Brahma.

For a comprehensive overview of more tools, we highlight this resource: https://github.com/Consensys/ethereum-developer-tools-list?tab=readme-ov-file

Prebuilt Smart Contract libraries and Testing Frameworks have several unique propositions for developers:

• Security and Auditing: Developing smart contracts from scratch can introduce vulnerabilities that may be exploited. On the other hand, prebuilt libraries like OpenZeppelin are extensively audited and tested, minimizing the risk of security flaws and ensuring developers can use them confidently. They also reduce the security costs, such as auditing for projects that adopt them rather than building from scratch.

• Time and Cost Efficiency: Writing secure and optimized smart contracts from the ground up is time-consuming and costly. Prebuilt libraries provide standardized templates for common use cases (e.g., token standards like ERC-20, governance, and access control), reducing the need to reinvent these solutions. Developers can save significant time and focus on their unique application logic instead of basic contract functionality.

• Modularity and Customization: These libraries offer modular components that developers can easily customize to integrate into their projects (e.g., adding additional functionalities to an ERC-20 token template).

• Reduced Development Complexity: Smart contract libraries abstract away some of the complexities of onchain development. They provide a higher level of abstraction that makes it easier for developers to implement complex functionality (e.g., multi-signature wallets, decentralized governance, or tokenomics) without deep blockchain expertise.

• Interoperability: Libraries like OpenZeppelin or Thirdweb ensure compatibility with popular blockchain standards and other dApps, platforms, and services within the broader blockchain ecosystem.

• Community and Ecosystem Support: Using widely adopted libraries provides access to a large community of developers who can offer support, share knowledge, and contribute to the library’s improvement.

2.2 AI-Powered Development Assistants

The emergence of AI has brought new tools that can improve the efficiency of onchain development through support and automation, speeding up integrations and simplifying how they can research for possible bugs and security risks.

These tools help developers write code, debug, and optimize smart contracts, reducing coding time and allowing them to focus on higher-level logic.

Examples of these tools include:

• GitHub Copilot: an AI-powered code completion tool built by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI, with over $300m in ARR (as of 2024). It assists developers by providing context-aware code suggestions, auto-generating code snippets, and offering solutions based on existing code and documentation: It’s like that friend who finishes your sentences but actually knows what they’re talking about (most of the time).

  
  Copilot helps speed up the coding process, reduce errors, and increase overall efficiency. Nonetheless, its answers sometimes might suffer from a lack of a “big picture” understanding, and for this reason it might be more suited for smaller and precise tasks.

• Cursor: a newer AI assistant that helps developers by providing intelligent code suggestions, autocompletion, and debugging support. It is built on VS code and uses a chat-driven workflow for “conversational coding”. Cursor grew to over $100m in ARR in just 12 months. Its main functionalities include enhancing productivity by offering faster iterations, context-aware assistance (with file-aware answers, using the open files for context-specific answers), and automating repetitive coding tasks, allowing developers to focus more on product development and less on mundane coding chores. Compared to the Github pilot, Cursor seems to work better for open-ended problems. Some weaknesses include some hit-or-miss explanations and intensive resource consumption, requiring powerful machines.

Combined, these tools can be particularly effective in supporting:

• Bug Detection and Debugging: analyze smart contract code for potential vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, and errors. By identifying issues early in the development process, AI assistants can help developers fix problems before deployment, reducing testing times and the risk of costly bugs or security breaches on the blockchain. Automated tests can include security audits, performance checks, and functional tests, allowing developers to deploy more reliable and secure contracts.

• Optimization Suggestions: optimize smart contract code for gas efficiency, performance, and security.

Nonetheless, most of these solutions are more general and less targeted to specific use cases that applications might have, so they could fail to encapsulate all of the nuances related to onchain development. In addition, they still require individual development and deployment and must be thoroughly tested before being deployed in production, incurring similar issues to the ones mentioned in Section 1.

To solve this gap, we have seen the emergence of Web3 protocols dedicated to making onchain development seamless, providing standardized libraries and tools, and abstracting the complexity of integrating new protocols across multiple networks, such as Enso.

3. Introducing Enso: The Shortcut to Faster Onchain Development

Enso is a direct solution to the pain points of onchain developments highlighted above, making it easier for every developer to develop or leverage DeFi interactions in their application. It does so by providing “shortcuts” for developers, who can use them to “interact with multiple DeFi protocols without manually integrating them.”

Say goodbye to long nights of coding. With Enso, developers can specify actions as intents that describe their desired outcomes, which are then executed in the background.

Enso is composed of three main components: Enso Shortcuts, the Enso Network, and the Enso Intent Engine. To understand the differences between them, let's break down each component.

3.1 Enso Shortcuts

Enso Shortcuts are pre-built actions that simplify complex onchain operations. They are built as reusable building blocks and combine several onchain actions, such as token swaps, lending, and any other DeFi integration, without the need for manual integrations.

Shortcuts abstract the complexity of integrations and transform them into automated flows, which developers can write as plain intents, which are key to abstracting the complexity of these interactions.

Let’s see how these shortcuts are actually enabled within Enso.

• Role: They serve as pre-configured combinations of actions that automate multi-step workflows.

• Function: Abstract the complexity of manual integrations and transform them into automated flows, enhancing execution efficiency and reducing development time.

• Key Benefits:

  • Simplifies developer workflows by bundling operations.

  • Reduces the need for custom coding for protocol integrations.

  • Improves scalability by enabling modular and chain-agnostic execution.

3.2 Enso Network

The Enso network plays a crucial role in facilitating seamless interactions across different blockchain networks. It stores necessary data for execution and provides a shared state for smart contracts, enabling cross-chain operations.

• Role: Serves as the infrastructure connecting multiple blockchain ecosystems.

• Function: Facilitates seamless interactions across different blockchain frameworks by centralizing data into a unified ledger.

• Key Benefits:

  • Enhances interoperability across blockchains.

  • Provides access to broader liquidity through solvers.

  • Protects against MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) attacks by optimizing transaction execution.

3.3 Enso Intent Engine

The Enso Intent Engine is the core technology that powers structured intents. It abstracts smart contract interactions across blockchain frameworks, enabling developers to define specific outcomes or actions without handling underlying complexities.

Enso aggregates all shortcuts and executable onchain actions through a centralized API and streamlined UI, substituting countless integrations with a single one, enabling modular and chain-agnostic development by abstracting all the complexities of onchain development.

This way, developers can simply leverage the Enso Intent Engine and dedicate their time to the most critical tasks, without manually integrating every smart contract.

• Role: Translates structured intents into actionable workflows. It abstracts the complexity of smart contract interactions across blockchain frameworks.

• Function: Converts structured intents into actionable workflows, leveraging shortcuts and network data to execute transactions efficiently.

• Key Benefits:

  • Enables modular development across blockchains.

  • Abstracts technical complexity, allowing developers to focus on product logic rather than infrastructure challenges.

  • Supports chain-agnostic applications by standardizing interactions.

Here’s a handy summary of their differences:

How do these elements interact with each other?

• The Intent Engine relies on the shared state provided by the Network to access necessary data for executing intents. This includes liquidity information, protocol-specific details, and transaction optimization strategies.

• The Network ensures that shortcuts can be applied seamlessly across multiple blockchains by maintaining interoperability and centralizing execution data. This allows shortcuts to work efficiently regardless of the underlying blockchain framework.

• Shortcuts provide predefined workflows that are utilized by the Intent Engine to execute user-defined intents. For example, if a developer defines an intent to "swap ETH for DAI and lend it," the Intent Engine uses relevant shortcuts to automate these actions.

In summary, Enso Shortcuts are specific tools within the broader Enso ecosystem that simplify complex blockchain operations. The Enso Network is the infrastructure that connects various blockchain ecosystems, while the Enso Intent Engine is the core technology that abstracts smart contract interactions.

3.4. How does Enso work? Example of an Interaction Flow

A developer defines a structured intent (e.g., "Swap ETH for DAI and lend it") that aligns with the capabilities of the Enso Intent Engine.

The Enso Intent Engine translates intents into a series of necessary actions (e.g., token approvals, swaps, lending), which are then matched with available shortcuts in the Enso Network.

The Enso Network provides the necessary data and shared state to execute these actions across different blockchain frameworks, ensuring shortcuts work seamlessly across various blockchains.

The Enso Shortcuts execute the actions as a single optimized transaction, fulfilling the developer's intent efficiently.

Instead of taking care of custom integrations individually, Enso provides developers with an abstraction layer that standardizes all onchain actions.

Any possible action developers might need to execute can therefore be combined into a shortcut, defined as a “combination of actions”, involving an individual or multiple transactions.

As a practical example, imagine a project that wants to deploy a DeFi solution where tokens are automatically swapped on Uniswap on Base and then deposited on Aave on Arbitrum. Instead of integrating each of these manually, protocols can combine these actions into an Enso shortcut, significantly reducing the development times and resulting costs.

By adopting Enso, projects can benefit from:

• Time Savings: Enso eliminates weeks or months of manual integration work.

• Cost Efficiency: Reduces audit costs by providing pre-secured transaction modules.

• Security-First Approach: Built-in security measures help prevent exploits and errors.

What else is possible? Let’s dive into more examples of shortcuts that are already live.

3.5 Case Studies: How Enso Helped Projects Scale Faster

Enso is already leveraged by 75+ projects, with over $11b in total intent volume settled and over $4b in direct volume settled.

How are these projects leveraging shortcuts?

3.5.1. Boyco – A Blockchain Marketplace

Boyco is a decentralized marketplace that incentivizes specific actions, aligning action providers and incentive providers. Boyco's primary goal was to bootstrap liquidity for applications before the launch of the Berachain mainnet.

They required a way for seamless DeFi integrations for liquidity and payment customized for Berachain.

In particular, Enso shortcuts allowed Boyco users to benefit from:

• Combined transactions into a single step

• Seamless liquidity strategies operating across multiple protocols

• Native asset routing capabilities

By leveraging Enso, Boyco reduced its development time by 60% and integrated multi-chain liquidity sources in days instead of months.

This massively contributed to Boyco's success in bootstrapping Berachain liquidity, with over $3b in TVL accrued in a short period and deployed safely through Enso.

The average transfer conducted highlights the nature of this partnership. While most other chains integrated by Enso have a smaller average transfer, Boyco is one of the first integrations with a clear focus on bootstrapping liquidity at a Layer 1 scale.

3.5.2. ZKSync Ignite – Powering One-click Deposits

Enso shortcuts also powered ZKsync Ignite, an incentive program to bootstrap liquidity on ZKsync Elastic Chain.

The Ignite program distributed over 300m ZK tokens to users that provided liquidity for key token pairs, traded on selected protocols and supplied assets to lending markets.

In particular, they leveraged Enso shortcuts for one-click deposits into pools, allowing users to simply select the pool they want to deposit and immediately add liquidity seamlessly.

3.5.3. CowSwap – Automating DeFi Intents

CowSwap is an AMM that leverages intents to execute complex DeFi transactions.

They use Enso as a solver for their swaps and Defi intents to ensure efficient trade settlement across multiple chains and reduce the maintenance costs for their integrations' smart contracts.

As Cowswap constantly develops new integrations for its AMM, shortcuts help it execute its roadmap more quickly.

Thanks to this and more updates, Cowswap continues to grow and now has over 30% of the DEX market share.

3.5.4. Onplug/Glider – Automating On-Chain Workflows

Other examples of projects that have chosen Enso to automate their onchain flows include Onplug and Glider. In particular, they leverage shortcuts to automate yield farming and lending strategies.

Onplug is a single app that provides a streamlined way to aggregate, manage, and execute your onchain activity all in one place. Thanks to Enso, Onplug could rebuild its integration layer (which took about 7 months) with shortcuts in 1.5 days. This alone gives you an idea of the savings protocols can experience by leveraging shortcuts.

Glider is a platform that provides users with portfolio automation services. With Enso shortcuts, they built a complete portfolio automation protocol with automated trading features in days.

Both these protocols leverage shortcuts to implement automation features and reduce transaction costs much faster than they would have traditionally, reducing their time to market.

More use cases include:

• AI Integration: AI-driven onchain automation. Example: BrianKnowsAI.

• Asset Management: focused on onchain asset management. Example: Velvet.

• TVL: Etherfi and Veda Labs.

• One-click LST Staking: Dinero.

• Optimized Call Data with direct-to-solver swaps: Li.fi

4. Food for Thought: The Need for Speed in Web3 Development

Web3 is still in its early days, and one of the most significant advantages new projects have is speed, the ability to quickly test, iterate, and refine their ideas to find PMF.

Developing onchain should not be an insurmountable challenge and should be made as easy as Web2 development, as fast as possible.

By leveraging Enso, developers can build, test, and deploy products faster, allowing them to focus on what truly matters—creating groundbreaking applications in the blockchain space.

Before Enso, Defi integrations were time-consuming, requiring months of manual integration, custom code, expensive audits, and slow rollouts. With Enso, a single shortcut can replace months of work in a few days, resulting in substantial savings from development costs and overheads.

Instructions to execute desired outcomes are specified as intents in plain text, making it further accessible for less experienced developers. With time, Enso will also transition to a permissionless ecosystem while it is currently focused on expanding its capabilities.

The success of initial case studies such as Cowswap and Boyco highlights the need for solutions that improve the speed of onchain development.

With the right tools, developers can focus on their products and reduce their time to market, security, and integration overhead.

With the blockchain ecosystem constantly evolving, we expect more protocols to choose this approach to simplify their integrations within Defi. This is especially true for smaller protocols planning a faster launch to capture mindshare within a new vertical.

Thanks to shortcuts, developers can reduce their headaches when building onchain, directly solving the current pain points regarding integrations, audits, security costs and risks, and slow time to market. These can now be abstracted, reducing a month's workload into a few days.

Brought to you by Francesco.

Thanks for reading, please follow us on Twitter at @Castle_Labs and visit our website to learn more about our services and get in touch.

Virtually yours,

The Castle