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 genuinely 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. The question wasn't how to grow the app 20%. It was whether the thing we were best at was actually 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, not what it did. 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's the hardest, least differentiated, most-duplicated work in DeFi. Every wallet and aggregator rebuilds it. The reframe: stop selling the outcome to end users and start selling the engine to builders. 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. The consumer app wasn't a failure to walk away from. It was the v1 that earned the right to reposition.
Read the asset, not the roadmap
The senior move was refusing to optimize the wrong thing. Instead of asking how to grow social trading, I worked from what Enso was genuinely best in the world at: the solver, not 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 became an API and solver rather than screens. 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 compounded with the ecosystem instead of with 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.
The headline isn't that a consumer app reached $3M TVL or that an infrastructure product crossed $10B+ in volume. It's that they're the same company, and the distance between those numbers is a product decision made well. Enso went from a capped consumer app to an intent infrastructure provider and solver other builders route real volume through. That came not from growing the original product but from recognizing it 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 never the social-trading UX. It was the solver underneath, and it took shipping the consumer product to see that clearly. The discomfort of the pivot was the point: walking away from launched traction toward an unvalidated B2B market is exactly the call that's easy to defer and expensive to get wrong. What I'd test harder next time is validating the infrastructure thesis in parallel rather than fully sequentially.