Bryce Ferguson and the art of getting out of the way

Bryce Ferguson helped build a place to keep $100 billion in crypto. Then he went looking for a way to make the money move. The distinction sounds small until you try to build an application on top of a vault. A vault is very good at being a vault. Ask it to become a payments product and the conversation gets longer.

At Coinbase Custody, Ferguson was the first product manager. He worked on security, new assets, staking and governance, the machinery that let institutions do something useful with digital assets once they owned them. At Trade Republic in Berlin, he stood on the other side of the counter, leading a crypto product that depended on infrastructure supplied by others.

Those two jobs gave him two views of the same obstruction. The companies building crypto applications needed more freedom than the available custody products allowed. In 2022, Ferguson co-founded Turnkey. Its proposition was precise: give developers the underlying tools for creating wallets and authorizing transactions, and let them decide what the finished product should be.

By September 10, 2026, Turnkey was reporting more than $200 billion in stablecoin transaction volume powered by its infrastructure. That number belongs to the company’s transaction activity, rather than its revenue or assets under management. It measures the distance Ferguson has travelled from institutional storage toward the business of keeping things in motion.

The useful impatience of a product manager

Ferguson’s route into crypto began outside it. He worked in consulting at Bain & Company, then moved to the strategy team at Stitch Fix. His account of the transition is refreshingly ordinary: he wanted to build products. Advising people who made things had become less appealing than helping make the things himself. A slide deck has many virtues; being a working product is rarely among them.

Conversations with friends at Coinbase drew him toward the company. He joined in 2018, starting in business operations and working on problems including customer conversion and staking. Product management followed. Here was a business where a question about what a customer wanted could quickly become a question about how a new financial system ought to work.

Custody brought those questions into focus. Ferguson and engineer Jack Kearney worked together as Coinbase’s institutional custody operation grew. Adding staking and governance meant extending the product beyond safekeeping. The assets had to remain protected while their owners participated in the networks those assets belonged to.

The next move took Ferguson to Berlin and Trade Republic, where he led the crypto team and helped build and expand its crypto trading product across Europe. Moving from supplier to customer exposed the awkward joins. Infrastructure that seemed reasonable when viewed from inside a custody provider could look restrictive from inside a consumer product team.

A reunion with a practical complaint

Kearney had also left Coinbase, becoming chief technology officer at Polychain. He, too, was using the sort of infrastructure they had once helped build. When the two reconnected in 2022, they had concrete complaints to compare. Developers needed to manage wallets as part of their applications, with more flexibility than a point-and-click custody interface could offer.

The founding circle extended beyond the pair. Sam McIngvale, another Coinbase Custody colleague, was part of Turnkey’s original team. Their shared background mattered because private keys are an unforgiving starting point for a startup. A private key authorizes actions involving digital assets. Making it easier to use requires equal attention to who is allowed to use it.

Ferguson already had a connection to Sequoia Capital as a scout. He introduced his colleagues to the firm, which led Turnkey’s seed round. Sequoia partner Alfred Lin pointed to the same mismatch the founders had encountered: developers faced sales cycles, minimum commitments and delayed support for the chains or assets they wanted to use.

Turnkey’s answer was an accessible API, the interface through which one piece of software gives instructions to another. The customer could build its own application around key management. That made the choice of customer unusually consequential. Ferguson was selling to people who wanted room to make decisions, including decisions he had not anticipated.

“We started Turnkey to unlock the innovation of crypto builders.”

Bryce Ferguson, 2023

The first customer took a year

There is a pleasingly unhurried detail in Ferguson’s account of Turnkey’s beginnings. Asked about a favourite memory of leading the company, he chose launching with its first customer. The customer worked in NFTs. The launch came in 2023, roughly a year after the company started, after a long stretch spent working through the security infrastructure.

That is a less cinematic milestone than a funding announcement. It is also more revealing about the job. Until somebody uses the product, its architecture is a promise. The first customer turns it into an obligation. For an infrastructure business, that obligation includes the hours when the founders are asleep and somebody else’s application is still running.

Turnkey emerged from beta for a public launch in August 2023. Its early adopters included Dynamic, Goldfinch and ZeroDev. The team had spent its opening months building around secure enclaves, isolated computing environments designed to protect sensitive operations. Selling that approach also required explaining it. Ferguson has described education as a substantial part of the early sales work.

The product’s apparent simplicity therefore rested on work the customer would rarely see. A developer could request a wallet or a signature without building the underlying security system. The clean interface was the result of complexity being handled elsewhere. This is a demanding form of hospitality: the guest gets a short instruction; the kitchen gets the evening.

The customer should have less homework

For someone using a consumer app, the payoff is more mundane than cryptography. They can sign in through familiar methods rather than first learning how to install a separate wallet or preserve a seed phrase. Turnkey supplies the wallet infrastructure inside the application. The user can get on with the reason they opened it.

DIMO, a network built around vehicle data, offers a concrete example. Its earlier onboarding asked people to negotiate external apps and crypto setup. With Turnkey, the company reported a 90 percent reduction in onboarding time and a 30 percent improvement in completion rates. Those are changes to the experience of arriving, before anyone can enjoy the product itself.

This is where Ferguson’s experience with consumer products becomes relevant to the infrastructure story. A complicated beginning is part of the product, however elegant the technology behind it. Every additional task asks a customer to become more committed before receiving more value. Many will quite reasonably have other plans for their afternoon.

The same logic applies to businesses. Lightspark integrated Turnkey into its Grid Global Accounts product in about a week. Lightspark credits the arrangement with saving four months of development time. Turnkey supplied wallet and signing capabilities; Brale supplied stablecoin issuance infrastructure. Lightspark could concentrate on the accounts it wanted its customers to use.

Big numbers, smaller components

In June 2025, Ferguson announced a $30 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto. Turnkey reported powering more than 50 million embedded wallets and signing millions of transactions each week. The financing supported hiring, integrations and further investment in open infrastructure, including QuorumOS, its operating system for verifiable computing.

Another $12.5 million strategic investment followed in May 2026, with Archetype and Circle Ventures joining existing investors. Total funding had passed $65 million. Alongside wallet infrastructure, Turnkey was developing its Verifiable Cloud, broadening the business into protected computing for sensitive workloads.

Modern Treasury’s September 2026 wallet announcement shows the division of labour Ferguson has been pursuing. Turnkey handles keys, signing and wallet policies; Modern Treasury supplies the broader payment operations. A customer can use non-custodial stablecoin wallets through an interface already connected to money movement and record keeping. Each component has a defined job.

Then, in October, Turnkey described Umbra using its Verifiable Cloud for viewing-key operations supporting private transactions on Solana. It is a different application of the same underlying concern: sensitive operations need protection, and the people relying on that protection need a way to verify what is running.

When the wallet belongs to the software

Ferguson’s next frontier introduces a customer who never gets bored with setup: the AI agent. Software that can initiate transactions creates different questions about permission. A human may make one bad decision. Automated software can repeat a decision at a speed that makes the mistake difficult to interrupt.

He has described an approach in which a person or business sets the rules and an agent operates within them. The agent gets permission to request signatures, while private keys remain protected. Transaction limits, restricted counterparties and approval requirements become part of the wallet’s design. His longer-term vision includes large numbers of agents transacting under such controls.

Back at the beginning, Ferguson wanted to make products rather than simply advise the people building them. Now his product gives those people a smaller set of problems to solve. The ambition has become larger; the preferred unit of progress is still practical. A customer gets through registration. A developer ships. A transaction goes where its owner intended. There is considerable work behind making that look uneventful.