Conor Howe: Why Web3 is Broken & How to Fix It at KBW2025

So, welcome him with a big round of applause. That's a lovely photo of me, clearly, right? So, how crypto is broken without Enso. I'm Conor Howe, the co-founder of Enso. I've been building full-time on chain for the last 9 years, so in 2016.

I discovered Bitcoin in 2013. I've helped build Filecoin, actualize stable coins that's used by the Swiss National Bank, and built cold infrastructure and hot storage as well, that holds over $5 billion as of today. Enso started over 4 and 1/2 years ago. We've enabled over $17 billion on chain. We pivoted our company two times to find product-market fit.

We've got over 100 It says 125, it's over 145 large projects using us. We've raised over $14.2 million from the likes of a Polychain, Multicoin. We've got a 400K+ community size, and we really are and will always be the number one on chain developer tooling. So, the agenda of today is what problem we're solving with Enso.

I think you've probably seen from a lot of speeches that some problems don't really exist, and people are trying to create solutions to problems that aren't there. An overview of Enso, an overview of the enterprise clients, how we powered the largest launch in this whole cycle, a bear chain, and an announcement today as we really do care about the Korean community. You know, building a product, whether you're in Web2 or Web3, you want to build your product, go to market, get users, test it, and get as many users as possible. Now, it doesn't matter if you're in Web2 or Web3, this is a universal case for building any sustainable business. Now, this is completely true within the Web 2 world.

We have developers building applications simply over the weekend that are turning into multi-billion-dollar companies. We have people building whether the age of 12 to 18, and these people are creating the next generation applications. Now, this is not true at all for crypto in the slightest. We have 4.8 million plus apps in the Web 2 world, and we have a measly 4.

8k inside of crypto. The question is, is it because we have a mis-alignment of incentives? Is it because people don't want to use crypto? Or is it because it's really hard to build products? Our view is it's really, really challenging for people to build products and test if people actually use them.

Because there's over 1,000 plus different blockchains. There's over 43 million smart contracts that live on Ethereum alone. Now, if you're a developer coming to the sequel system, and you're expected to integrate over 1,000 different blockchains, they can't even start the process. They're spending years to be able to release a product. If a new chain comes around, they're spending a month for this integration.

If they want to offer on-chain functionality in their product, they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in audits. The whole developer tooling ecosystem is fundamentally broken in crypto. Because it's taken 6 to 8 months for a team that is live and building in crypto for years. Never mind if you're a developer and you've not built in crypto before, you're spending two plus, even five years some people have, to build a product. You know, trends and narratives come.

So, what people want changes continuously. If we have an industry that requires people to wait five years to ship a product, we're fundamentally going to fail. So, this is why we built Enso. Oh, that goes. Uh if we could play the video, and then I'll go into all of the details of how Enso operates.

Sweet. So, um so, Enso really is positioning itself as the engine that powers all of Web3. You know, like I was saying, there's over a thousand-plus blockchains, there's over 43 million smart contracts. As this ecosystem grows, which I hope we're all aware that this is a very small ecosystem as of today, like we only have 28,000 developers in crypto, and we have over 47 million developers in the Web2 industry, we cannot expect people to manage all of this infrastructure themselves. So, with the Enso, the integrate one tool, they can get access to all of the primitives that live on chain and also off chain, and they can get access to all of the different blockchains.

Now, these blockchains could be built on Ethereum using Solidity, they could also be built on Solana, which is Rust, could be even Movement, which is using Move or Sui, Sei, and so forth. Now, this is a future-proof infrastructure that allows people to move with the trends, with the markets, to be able to ship a product over the weekend instead of over 2 years. Again, before Anso, this is literally what it looks like. Now, the reason that we're able to understand this problem so well is we pivoted our company two times. We started off wanting to build a social trading product.

We spent over year and a half building that, over half a million dollars on audits alone. This is the journey that we had to do. We changed the whole primitive of how to integrate protocols on chain. We then launched a DeFi super app, and when we launched that, we had 50 on-chain integrations through one protocol. Now, what happened?

We had tons of teams reach out to us and say, "Hey, how the hell did you integrate all of these protocols? It's completely unheard of." And we realized, "Wow, this is a larger problem than what we actually realized, because there's other teams that want to use blockchain and in use all the protocols on them without having to integrate everything manually manually themselves." So again, they really just integrate one, two. Now, integrations, you may think are just plug and play.

So here, I integrated a smart contract, it's ready to roll. Not at all. You need to write a smart contract that interacts with another smart contract that creates a completely different layer of security risk as well for the users. You need to get these smart contracts audited. Every integration you add on chain in a smart contract also creates a factor of 5 to 10 to 100x of the security vulnerabilities.

You need to learn how to combine all of these actions on chain, and we started to realize, "Why can't people just plug and play and reuse things? And that's all they really need to do." with Anso. We have over, again, this number is wrong. Um, it's over 145.

The core fundamental issue of crypto and how honestly we might fail as an industry is we cannot we're not allowing people to build products. We're having people create narratives, creating narratives to sell tokens, not products. That's not how Web2 operates, and if we want to build the new internet, we need to have people building products properly. Now, the the issue is larger than what we actually realize because we have so many different industries using Enso. So, we have AI projects like Virtuals, a16z, Wavefinder, Lyra OS.

We have all the real-world assets, you know, Plume. Plume is here at the conference. They are using Enso, Coinshift, Inverse. We've also supported mainnet launches for their Sonic launch, also for zkSync, also for Unitrade, and Berachain. That was our infrastructure underneath that allowed people to interact with those chains on day one.

We work very closely with Stargate and LayerZero and LiFi users underneath. Uniswap is also used as in production. Also, Kodiak, also SushiSwap. Now, you can kind of see a trend, which is how do they all interact on chain? And that's the tool of Enso.

I want to go through a couple of key highlights of launches that have been done using Enso. So, Berachain, I think we all know and we've all heard of. You probably have heard about the Boiko Roiko campaign that was happening. That purely was just a front end. They were able to just build a front end and not build any smart contracts, not build any of the integrations on chain to move over 3.

1 billion dollars within 3 days from Ethereum over to Berachain. Whenever those funds landed on Berachain, we created 80 unique different combinations. So, most literally the most complex DeFi execution that has happened in this whole industry, where people are able to say, lend, borrow, leverage 10x, take one side of token, enter LP, take LP token, wrap it into vault. That's one unique combination, and this was used for 80 plus combinations on day one. Zero loss of funds, everything operated as expected.

Also, Uniswap. You know, Uniswap, they power they launched UniChain recently. They had a campaign with Merkle. Incentivization in UNI tokens to deposit your positions into Uniswap V4. They have so much liquidity on V2 and V3 on EVM chains.

So, they were using us for a migration tool to migrate your V2 and V3 positions over to V4 on on UniChain. So, for example, the flow would be V2 token, burn the V2, take the two underlying, bridge them, swap them if needed, and then enter into V4 position. Now, even V3, we went from NFTs into ERC-20s, NFTs to NFTs. This is a very, very complex infrastructure, and they were able to do this for the UniChain launch. Now, like I was saying earlier, really, this crypto industry is so small.

I'm not sure if we can con- actually can understand how small this is, and it's hard for me to con- to context it as well, that we only have 28,000 developers. If we're expecting new developers of this industry that have no understanding of how crypto operates, just envision these people do not have all the years of experience that we've all accumulated to integrate every chain, understand the nuances of each blockchain, understand every single integration on chain before they can even build a product. You know, we should be having people innovation within this crypto industry to ship products, see what people actually enjoy, and that we can move forward past the 28,000 developers. So, really, our goal is to reach all the web two developers, which is 47 million. Now, what that will result in is completely unique ideas.

You know, we need to stop looking at crypto Twitter for ideas because it's the same ideas being recycled and recycled. There's not much innovation nowadays in this industry. And we need to tap outside of the 28 to the 47 million, so we can get the innovation back in this industry. And so, not only really is the engine that powers all of these large applications like Uniswap, Berachain, we also have Etherfi, Renzo, and many, many more that people know, a Rainbow Wallet. We also have a very, very strong community.

So, we have over 400,000 participants across Discords and across Twitter. They've realized the movement that Anzo's created, which is product beats paper. Stop writing white papers and actually ship a product. We have what We have the largest retail campaign in all of this industry in the last year. We created a gamified experience where retail are able to go and understand the Anzo infrastructure.

You can actually go and use this as of today. It's still live for a couple more weeks. Where you can create and deploy your own blockchain application in a matter of minutes. Now, if you're not a developer, you don't need to understand all of the nuances of crypto to be able to get people to use your product. And we will and will always be the engine of web 3.

Similar to how Unity have positioned themselves inside of the web 2 industry for building games, similar to Figma for creating design files, Anso is a web 3 toolkit for the engine for developing crypto applications. This is the exclusive announcement today. We've already released two new products using our own infrastructure this month alone. Two products this month. People are able to reduce development time from 7 months to a day and a half using Anso.

So, we're coming up with new ideas inside of the team. Takes us a couple of days. Boom, we release it. This is a new one that we thought of. Why do we not have 300 billion dollars sitting in exchanges to be used on chain into crypto?

Because it's been extremely challenging to disconnect of the wallets, managing all of these, managing bridges, managing transactions, gas, and withdrawing all of this from centralized exchanges. So, we've created the first ever tool in crypto for checkout. It is the default payment rails for all of crypto. Where users are able to connect their centralized exchange accounts to their on chain applications. Where now these applications can tap into 300 billion dollars that's sitting idle in these exchanges.

Not only does it ability to withdraw from centralized exchanges, you're also able to deposit from any chain to to any protocol on any on any chain. So, for example, if I can only withdraw, let's say GNO, like Gnosis token, on Ethereum, but I want to use it on Gnosis, it'll withdraw the on centralized exchange onto Ethereum using 4337 bundlers, gasless to bridge over onto Gnosis, and then execute into the the protocol that I wanted from the beginning really minimizes the the friction. This is what it really looks like, a simple unified experience where users are able to connect all of the different exchanges. I believe there's over 50 plus exchanges that can be used through this already. See your balances across all your different exchanges.

And here in this example, you're using your USDC to enter into a liquid BTC vault. So not only is it able to withdraw, it's also able to then swap your USDC, get the underlying which is wrapped BTC, and go into liquid BTC all within one transaction. Thank you very much. And yeah, I've been in Korea the whole month of September. If you want to get a coffee or you want to chat, here's my Telegram.

And here's a community Telegram. And we have a booth downstairs in B1. So if you do want to come chat, learn about Enzo, happy to do so. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr.

Connor Hall.