Remember when new Layer-1 chains used to launch into total silence? A shiny new blockchain would go live, validators would cheer, and then… nothing. For weeks (sometimes months) the only activity was a handful of bots and brave souls bridging tokens over to stare at an empty DEX. I’ve watched it happen so many times I lost count.
That era just ended.
On November 24 something genuinely new happened: a high-performance Layer-1 launched with a full-stack DeFi ecosystem ready before the genesis block was even mined. And the company that made it possible is Enso – a name you’re going to hear a lot more of in 2026.
The Real Problem New Chains Face Isn’t Speed – It’s Plumbing
Everyone loves quoting TPS numbers. “10,000 transactions per second!” Cool. But transactions of what? Air? Because without actual usable applications, those numbers are just marketing slides.
The ugly truth is that building real DeFi on a fresh chain has always been brutally slow. Every single protocol – DEXs, lending markets, yield optimizers, bridges – needs separate integrations. One team wants to add liquidity to a new AMM? Great, go write custom routing code for six different swap aggregators. Another team wants to let users zap into a vault? Better spend two weeks talking to every single token contract.
We’ve accepted this friction as normal for years. Enso looked at that mess and basically said: no more.
What Enso Actually Does (And Why It Feels Like Magic)
Think of Enso as the “missing abstraction layer” for DeFi. Instead of forcing every builder to wire together twenty different protocols by hand, Enso collapses hundreds of actions into a single, ridiculously simple API.
- Swap any token to any token across any DEX
- Bridge to 30+ chains in one call
- Deposit into lending markets
- Mint stablecoins
- Zap in/out of complex positions
- Supply liquidity with automatic rebalancing
All of that – and literally hundreds more actions – through one integration. I’ve spoken to founders who cut months off their roadmap just by dropping in Enso’s SDK. One team told me privately they went from “idea” to live perpetuals trading app in nine days. Nine. Days.
Monad’s Secret Weapon: Shipping Fully Loaded
Monad has been hyped for ages as “the parallel EVM that actually works.” 10,000+ TPS, sub-100ms block times, full byte-code compatibility with Ethereum. Impressive on paper.
But the Monad team clearly understood something deeper: in 2025, raw performance is table stakes. What wins is instant economic density.
“Supporting Monad from day one reflects exactly what Enso was built for: giving builders immediate access to the liquidity and tooling they need to ship valuable products fast.”
– Milos Costantini, Enso co-founder
Translation: the moment Monad flips the switch, $MON isn’t just a fast gas token sitting in wallets. It can be swapped, lent, used as collateral, farmed, bridged, and zapped – immediately. That’s never happened before at this scale.
Why Day-One Tooling Changes the Entire Game
Network effects in crypto are viciously winner-take-all. The chain that gets meaningful TVL fastest usually keeps it. Look at Solana in 2021 – the moment usable DeFi appeared, capital flooded in and never left.
By shipping with Enso pre-integrated, Monad is effectively shortcutting the usual six-month “desert period” every new L1 suffers. Traders can start farming. Degens can start aping. Yield optimizers can start optimizing. All on day one.
Perhaps the most interesting part? This isn’t just about Monad. Enso’s move sets a new standard. I’d bet serious money that every ambitious L1 launching in 2026 will either copy this playbook or fade into obscurity.
The Bigger Trend: Abstraction Eating Blockchain Complexity
We’re watching the maturation of an entire philosophical shift in crypto. Five years ago the narrative was “move fast and break things on your own chain.” Today the narrative is “hide all the complexity and let users just do stuff.”
Enso sits at the center of that shift alongside projects like Across, Socket, and the various intent solvers popping up. Together they’re building what feels like the “cloud operating system” for blockchains – where the underlying chain becomes almost irrelevant to the end user.
Monad’s launch is the first real proof that this model scales to a brand-new Layer 1 with its own native token and validator set. If it works – and early signs say it will – we’re going to see an explosion of hyper-specialized chains that don’t waste time reinventing DeFi plumbing.
What Happens Next (My Take)
Three predictions, no hedging:
- Monad captures top-5 TVL among L1s (excluding Ethereum) within 90 days.
- At least four more chains announce similar “Enso-at-genesis” partnerships before summer 2026.
- The phrase “day-zero liquidity” becomes the new “real yield” – everyone will claim it, few will actually deliver it.
I’ve been in this industry long enough to be skeptical of launch hype. But when the tooling is this good and this early? That’s the kind of unfair advantage that actually matters.
The desert period for new chains is over. Welcome to the age of instant onchain economies.
So yeah – keep an eye on Monad this week. Not just because it’s fast, but because it might have just rewritten the rulebook for how new blockchains win.
