Daniel Enright is a software development professional with over 20 years of experience as a business analyst and project manager. He currently leads ecosystem efforts at LightLink and has founded DeFi protocol Amped Finance. Enright began his career in 2006 in video games, worked at National Australia Bank, and later founded his own web3 infrastructure business.
What’s the origin story behind Amped Finance?
Amped was born during my time at LightLink, where I served as Ecosystem Lead. As a relatively small layer 2 with a limited budget to attract protocols, I took the initiative to deploy a perpetual swaps exchange. While we saw decent activity, we soon shifted focus to larger networks in pursuit of more total value locked and adoption.
After launching on Base, Berachain, and BSC, we landed on Sonic, a network with the right ingredients to support our growth. Sonic had sufficient DeFi volume to sustain consistent fees, which were redistributed to LPs to drive further TVL. Those yields improved further with the introduction of yALP, an auto-compounding vault that reinvests LP rewards.
Amped has always reflected the kind of DeFi platform I personally want to use. As a father of two, my time in front of the screen has dwindled, so I’ve focused on removing the complexities of managing DeFi positions — yALP was one step in that direction.
Our integration with HeyAnon and the introduction of AI agents for managing onchain finance is next. I believe DeFi’s future is agentic, so we’re building Amped to provide an AX (agentic experience) layer for that future.
What’s driving Amped’s traction on Sonic?
I’d attribute it to our unified liquidity pool — spanning seven assets — and our use of frequently updated Pyth price feeds. This structure differs from the typical AMMs on Sonic and other networks, enabling highly efficient swaps at competitive prices.
We’re also integrated with several aggregators like Fly, Odos, OpenOcean, and KyberSwap, which route trades through us whenever we offer the best pricing. That’s helped us widen the funnel for swap volume and revenue.
What’s the adoption split between ALP and yALP?
Currently, ALP is still more commonly held, but yALP is gaining ground. It’s newer, so many of our recent users are choosing yALP for its hands-off approach.
Because it’s an ERC-20 token, yALP is composable across Sonic’s DeFi ecosystem. It can be listed as a trading pair on other AMMs, which lets users gain exposure to a Sonic index token without using our platform. In the future, we’d love to see yALP used as collateral on lending protocols — so users can borrow against it while still earning yield.
How does the HeyAnon agentic AI integration work?
We started by defining Amped’s core functions — everything from leveraged trading to liquidity supply and reward claims — so that LLMs could interface with them.
This groundwork will also support integration with other frameworks, like MCP servers for Claude and additional LLMs.
Using it is simple. You can type or speak a command like: “Supply 20 USDC as liquidity on Amped” or “open a long position with 10x leverage on $S,” and the transaction will execute, returning a hash.
In the future, we see agents making micro-decisions autonomously — your job will be directing them to find the best yield opportunities.
Why use a low-FDV overflow IDO with Atlantis?
We really admire Atlantis for innovating in the fundraising space. Their overflow model rewards early participants with extended time farming escrowed AMPED and ensures fair distribution no matter when users join.
It’s a structure that aligns incentives and supports a more inclusive approach to token distribution. We credit Atlantis for putting a lot of thought into the design.
What’s the benefit of distributing escrowed AMP from day one?
Escrowed AMP serves as a built-in reward mechanism for liquidity providers. It made perfect sense to extend that to our early IDO participants — those supporting us from day one should benefit from yield-sharing right away. It’s all about aligning long-term incentives from the start.
What’s your philosophy on airdrops and retroactive rewards?
We wouldn’t be here without our early supporters. They took the risk, and it’s only fair that we give back.
We’re allocating 3% of our supply to a retroactive airdrop, one month after the token generation event, covering all historical activity across every chain we’ve deployed on. It’s our way of saying thank you.
What new strategies will you explore on next-gen chains like Monad and MegaETH?
These high-performance chains let us experiment with real-time price feeds and faster, more responsive trading execution.
That opens the door for AI-native and high-frequency strategies that just aren’t feasible on most existing networks.
What’s your top priority for Q4 2025?
Improving the user experience is at the top of the list. Right now, we’ve found strong product-market fit with LPs looking for yield. But what if users could create their own asset baskets, earn rewards based on how well those baskets perform, and even borrow against them, while also earning yield from intra-vault trading?
Like I said earlier, I want to build something I’d use myself. A vault of handpicked assets that earns yield and serves as collateral feels like an ideal way to put capital to work.