Turnkey

Turnkey is a wallet infrastructure company that lets developers embed non-custodial wallets, automate on-chain transactions, and enforce granular access controls through a single API, without raw private keys ever leaving hardware-isolated secure enclaves.

What It Does

Turnkey sits between an application and a blockchain. Instead of managing private keys in server memory or a software secrets store, a developer calls the Turnkey REST API to generate a key, request a signature, and broadcast a transaction. The key never leaves the Turnkey enclave boundary; the application only ever handles a signed payload. This model applies equally to a consumer-facing embedded wallet, a treasury management system, or an autonomous AI agent executing on-chain actions.

The company offers three broad product lines. Embedded Wallets covers user-facing wallets for consumer apps, multi-user business accounts, and white-label wallet-as-a-service platforms. Company Wallets covers smart contract management, payment orchestration, and agentic wallets where AI agents move value on-chain under policy-controlled rules. Key Management covers enterprise disaster recovery and encryption key storage use cases that go beyond cryptocurrency.

How It Works

At the technical core is Turnkey's use of AWS Nitro Enclaves, a class of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) that isolate computation from the host operating system and from Turnkey's own staff. Private key generation, encryption, and all signing operations occur exclusively inside these enclaves. Combined with remote attestation, a mechanism that lets external parties cryptographically verify which code is running inside the enclave, Turnkey can offer verifiable rather than merely promised security.

All policies are enforced inside the enclave itself, not in an application layer that could be bypassed. The policy engine evaluates rules such as transaction spending limits, address whitelists, DeFi protocol restrictions, and time-based access windows before a signature is produced. The Turnkey Verifiable Cloud product, in private beta as of 2025, extends this model to general-purpose workloads, allowing other sensitive operations such as compliance checks, AI agent execution, and data feeds to run with the same hardware-rooted attestation guarantee.

The platform operates at the cryptographic curve layer, which means the same infrastructure that signs Secp256k1 transactions for EVM chains also signs Ed25519 transactions for Solana, without chain-specific key management pipelines. Signing latency runs at 50-100ms with 99.9% uptime.

Solana Integration

Turnkey has dedicated Solana infrastructure across its stack. Keys are generated as Ed25519 keypairs, with Solana addresses derived directly from the public key in standard base58 encoding. The @turnkey/solana NPM package provides a TurnkeySigner class that drops into the official Solana web3js library, letting developers use Turnkey-managed keys anywhere they would use a local Keypair object. A companion @turnkey/wallet-stamper package allows an existing Solana wallet to authenticate Turnkey API calls by signing the request payload, useful for user-owned key delegation flows.

When broadcasting via the Turnkey managed transaction path through solSendTransaction, the platform handles blockhash fetching and injection at broadcast time, compute unit limit estimation to prevent failed transactions, and priority fee configuration for inclusion guarantees. Fee sponsorship is available as an opt-in feature: setting the sponsor flag eliminates the SOL balance requirement for end users, with costs billed to the developer's monthly Turnkey invoice. Solana rent sponsorship, which covers the lamport deposit required to open new accounts, can also be enabled via the dashboard.

For policy enforcement on Solana, Turnkey runs a secure enclave-based transaction parser that extracts program keys, accounts, signers, and instruction data. IDL (Interface Description Language) support lets developers write policies against named fields rather than raw bytes, enabling rules such as only allowing swaps on a given protocol up to a specified amount.

Developers can import wallets using BIP39 mnemonics or base58-encoded private keys, and export in the same formats.

Customers and Ecosystem Fit

Turnkey has been adopted across a broad range of applications. Consumer platforms include Moonshot, which powers millions of self-custodial wallets with email and two-factor onboarding, and Polymarket, which uses Turnkey for prediction market account management. Institutional and DeFi customers include Alchemy, Axiom, True Markets, and Anchorage Digital, which is an early beta customer for Verifiable Cloud. AI agent builders like Spectral Labs use Turnkey to give autonomous agents policy-constrained signing authority. Payment companies including Mural Pay and Flutterwave use it for stablecoin transfers.

Mysten Labs, the creator of the Sui blockchain, and Lightspark, a Bitcoin payments company, are also listed customers, demonstrating that Turnkey's chain-agnostic architecture serves infrastructure teams across multiple ecosystems. For Solana specifically, the platform is positioned as a strong option for treasury management, high-frequency signing, and AI agent infrastructure given its enclave-native Ed25519 signing and enclave-enforced policy engine.

Team and Funding

Turnkey was founded in 2022 by veterans of Coinbase Custody. CEO Bryce Ferguson has described the company thesis as removing the trust assumption from wallet infrastructure: developers should not need to trust Turnkey's internal controls any more than they trust a smart contract, because attestation proofs make the infrastructure verifiable.

The company has raised over $65 million in total. Its Series B of $30 million was led by Bain Capital Crypto with participation from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Faction, Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and Variant. A subsequent $12.5 million strategic round added Circle Ventures and Archetype. In 2025, Turnkey was named to the CNBC World Top Fintech Companies list.

Security and Audits

Turnkey has undergone multiple independent security audits: Distrust in 2022, Cure53 in 2023, Trail of Bits in both 2023 and 2024, and Zellic in 2023. The platform achieved SOC 2 Type II certification in December 2024. Its enclave code is open-source and reproducibly built, allowing any party to verify that the attestation measurements match the published source.

There is no native Turnkey token. The platform is priced as a developer API service.