From social trading to $10B in intent volume.
Pivoted a consumer DeFi app into the intent infrastructure layer that now settles billions on-chain.
01 · The problem
What Enso actually needed.
Enso started with a consumer thesis: make DeFi strategies as easy to follow as following a trader. The social-trading platform launched and reached $3M in TVL, but the ceiling was the problem. Consumer DeFi adoption was thin and acquisition was expensive. The hard part, composing transactions across dozens of protocols and chains, sat buried inside the app, invisible to the market that needed it most: other builders. Growing the app 20% was the easy question. The harder one was whether the thing we were best at was the product we were selling. Getting it wrong meant scaling spend behind a capped market.
02 · Context and insight
The reframe that set the direction.
The insight came from looking at what the product was made of. To let one user mirror another's strategy, Enso had built an engine that takes a desired end-state and computes the exact sequence of on-chain actions to reach it, across protocols and chains, atomically. That is some of the hardest work in DeFi, and some of the most duplicated: every wallet and aggregator rebuilds it. So the plan became to sell the engine to builders and stop selling the outcome to end users. The market was shifting toward intent-based architectures, and Enso already had a working solver in production, just pointed at the wrong customer.
03, The approach
The decisions that mattered.
Ship the consumer product first, and use it as the proof
Before any pivot talk, the social-trading app had to launch and stand on its own. It did, at $3M TVL. That mattered beyond the number. A live product with real capital is the only honest way to learn where a thesis breaks, and it proved the engine could compose real transactions across protocols with money on the line. Seen that way, the consumer app was the v1 that earned us the right to reposition.
Read the asset before the roadmap
I refused to optimize the wrong thing. I set aside the question of how to grow social trading and worked from what Enso was best in the world at: the solver under the social layer. Separating the durable asset (intent resolution and cross-protocol execution) from the disposable wrapper (the consumer UI) turned a struggling app into an infrastructure company. The tradeoff was explicit and uncomfortable: walk away from launched traction to chase a B2B market we hadn't validated yet.
Reposition the company around the engine as a product
Pivoting the product meant pivoting everyone's definition of the customer, from a retail trader to a developer integrating intent execution into their own app. The surface moved from screens to an API and solver. The docs and integration experience became the product. Success metrics moved from TVL and signups to integrations and routed volume. Each integrating builder brought their own users and flow, so volume grew with the ecosystem and no longer tracked our marketing spend.
04 · How it's built
Close to the stack, not above it.
Enso's core was an on-chain intent solver: software that takes a declared end-state and computes the exact, atomic sequence of transactions to reach it across protocols and chains. That puts Solidity and deep DeFi understanding at the center of the stack, even from the product seat. The work I led was product: framing the reposition, redefining the customer and the surface, and driving cross-functional execution. The hard engineering, solver logic and protocol integrations, was the team's. My job was making sure we pointed that engineering at the market that valued it most.
A consumer app that reached $3M TVL and an infrastructure product that crossed $10B+ in volume are the same company. The distance between those numbers came from one product decision. Enso went from a capped consumer app to an intent infrastructure provider and solver other builders route real volume through. The gain came from recognizing the original product was the wrong wrapper around a far more valuable engine.
What I’d carry forward
The most valuable thing a team builds is often hidden inside the thing it's trying to sell. Enso's moat was the solver under the social-trading UX, and it took shipping the consumer product to see that clearly. The pivot was uncomfortable: walking away from launched traction toward an unvalidated B2B market is the kind of call that's easy to defer and expensive to get wrong. Next time I'd start validating the infrastructure thesis while the consumer app was still running.