Enso | ⌘ 🛠️ (@EnsoBuild): Enso 101: Actions & Shortcuts

Enso 101: Actions & Shortcuts Web3 has grown into one of the most vibrant ecosystems in technology. There are lending markets, decentralized exchanges, staking protocols, yield optimizers, and bridges across dozens of chains. Billions of dollars move through these systems every day, and new ideas appear constantly. Despite this growth, with thousands of chains, millions of smart contracts, and over a trillion dollars in market cap, there are still no real apps. What we have instead are fragmented systems: every protocol speaks its own language, every chain enforces its own rules, and developers must constantly rebuild the same integrations from scratch. The more infrastructure we create, the more complex and disconnected the ecosystem becomes. This is the bottleneck that Enso exists to solve. At its core, Enso is a shared engine that standardizes how applications interact onchain. It turns hundreds of incompatible systems into one unified network, and the foundation of that system begins with Actions and Shortcuts. Actions: the universal building blocks DeFi is made up of repeated patterns. People swap tokens, deposit into vaults, borrow against collateral, stake for yield, or move assets across chains. Every protocol implements these differently, but at the core, the intent is the same. That’s what Actions capture. They are the universal building blocks of crypto, standardized verbs that abstract away the differences between protocols. Without Enso: a developer who wants to add “swap” to their app must integrate Uniswap, then repeat the work for Sushi, Curve, and Balancer. Each comes with unique contracts, APIs, and edge cases. With Enso: the developer calls one Swap Action. It works across every integrated DEX and DEX aggregator. The same is true for deposits, borrows, harvests, and bridges. So a user is able to say uniswap.swap, balancer.swap and such. This is more than a convenience. It flips the development model from fragmented integrations to a single shared library of functions. Think of an Action as a verb in the shared language of DeFi. Swap, Deposit, Borrow, Harvest, Bridge, these are the most common things people do across protocols. Different systems may implement them differently, but the intent is the same. ​​https://docs.enso.build/api-reference/integration/supported-actions An Action abstracts away those differences. Instead of writing one integration for Uniswap, another for Sushi, another for Curve, and another for Balancer, a developer can simply call a single Swap Action that works across all of them. Today, Enso supports more than 15 Action types across 200+ protocols. Some of the most common include: Swap – exchange one token for another Deposit – supply assets into a protocol or vault Borrow – take out a loan against collateral Harvest – collect yield or rewards Bridge – move assets across chains Actions are also designed to be composable. Each one executes sequentially, and the output of one Action can feed directly into the next. If you swap USDC for ETH in one step, the next step can automatically use that ETH as collateral to borrow against. This is handled through a mechanism called useOutputOfCallAt, which lets developers link Actions together without extra code. By abstracting functions into Actions, Enso gives builders a universal toolkit. These building blocks are reusable, portable, and always consistent, no matter which protocol or chain lies underneath. Shortcuts: putting Actions together If Actions are the verbs, then Shortcuts are the sentences. A Shortcut is a sequence of Actions bundled into one transaction, turning what would normally be multiple steps into a single motion. https://docs.enso.build/pages/build/examples/shortcuts Consider an example: Without Enso: A user wants to deposit USDC into Aave. They need to swap into the right asset, approve the token, deposit it into the lending pool, and possibly adjust collateral settings. Each of these requires its own transaction. With Enso: The entire process becomes a Shortcut — Swap → Approve → Deposit — executed atomically in one step. This fundamentally changes what developers can build. With Shortcuts, complex DeFi strategies can be expressed as simple, reusable modules. A deposit into a vault, a leverage loop, or a cross-chain rebalance can all be reduced to one Shortcut. The shared engine behind it all Actions and Shortcuts are not standalone tools. They are powered by Enso’s shared execution engine, which connects protocols and chains into one unified network. This shared engine does more than just standardize functions. It ensures that every Action and Shortcut can be executed consistently, with outputs that can flow into other systems. A protocol integrated once becomes instantly available everywhere. A workflow designed for one chain can be reused on another. Because the engine is part of a network, every new integration or Action added by one participant becomes available to everyone else. This creates a compounding effect: the more protocols Enso supports, the more valuable the entire system becomes. Why this matters On the surface, Actions and Shortcuts make life easier for developers and smoother for users. But the impact runs deeper. They transform how the entire crypto economy can grow. Composability has always been crypto’s promise, yet in reality it’s been limited by integration costs. Enso changes this dynamic. Because Actions are universal, every new protocol added strengthens the entire system. Because Shortcuts can chain those Actions, workflows that once took dozens of steps across chains collapse into one. And because it all runs on a shared engine, builders don’t just benefit from their own work, they inherit the work of everyone else on the network. The result is a compounding effect: For builders: Smaller teams can launch cross-chain products in weeks, not months. For users: Strategies that used to take hours and multiple apps can be executed in a single click. For the ecosystem: By enabling more powerful applications to be built faster, Enso accelerates the next wave of Web3 innovation. Actions and Shortcuts fix this by giving us a universal grammar for DeFi. The shared engine ensures that grammar is consistent across ecosystems. And the network effect means builders don’t just benefit from their own work, but from the contributions of the entire Enso community. At the big-picture level, Actions and Shortcuts are the foundation of something larger. They’re how Enso turns fragmentation into coherence, and how the network evolves into a universal engine for Web3.