The Company That Locked Up the Keys - Then Let Anyone Prove It

The most valuable thing in crypto is also the most boring to explain: a private key. It is a long string of characters that controls money, and if you lose it or leak it, the money is gone. Bryce Ferguson and Jack Kearney spent years at Coinbase building the vault that guarded that string for institutions - the division that helped scale Coinbase Custody past $100 billion in assets. Then they left, tried to build their own products on other people's key-management software, and, in Ferguson's words, spent months "hitting our heads against the wall."

So in 2022 they built the thing they wished existed. Turnkey is wallet infrastructure - an API and a set of SDKs that let any developer create non-custodial crypto wallets, guard the keys, enforce rules about what those keys can sign, and automate transactions across hundreds of blockchains. You have probably used an app built on it without ever seeing the name.

01 / The problemEvery transaction starts and ends with a key

Ferguson likes to reduce the whole industry to a single sentence. "Every transaction in crypto starts and ends with a private key," he has said. "Creating, storing, managing, securing, and using private keys are extremely hard problems to solve." That is the gap Turnkey sells into. Most developers do not want to become cryptographers. They want a wallet to appear inside their app, a transaction to go through, and nobody to get robbed in between.

The trick is doing that without holding the customer's money. Turnkey is non-custodial: neither the company nor the app built on top of it can move a user's assets. Keys are generated inside hardware-isolated secure enclaves - Turnkey uses AWS Nitro Enclaves - and are never decrypted outside of them. A key is only unlocked, briefly, inside a tamper-proof environment, and only after a user authenticates with a passkey, biometric, or API credential. There are no seed phrases to write on a sticky note.

The team is small for the amount it guards. Turnkey describes itself as a lean organization, "low on hierarchy and unnecessary meetings, and high on personal agency," and says its founding group brings more than 100 combined years in cryptography, security, and low-level systems - the kind of unglamorous discipline that does not trend but keeps money from vanishing. The engineering team works remotely; the rest sit in the New York headquarters on West 18th Street.

"Crypto builders shouldn't have to blindly trust their infrastructure." - Turnkey, on its Series B

02 / The differenceVerifiable, not just trusted

Here is where Turnkey diverges from the pack. Most competitors ask you to trust that their code behaves. Turnkey runs its signing workloads on QuorumOS, a minimal, immutable operating system it open-sourced in January 2025. It requires a quorum of people to sign off before any code touching keys is provisioned or updated, and it publishes cryptographic attestations that let a customer verify, in real time, that the software running is the exact approved code, untampered.

"From day one, our infrastructure has been built to make critical operations verifiable, not just secure," Ferguson says. "Verifiable systems remove that assumption by offering evidence, allowing anyone to confirm that the code running is approved and untampered." That idea - proof over reputation - became a product in its own right, the Turnkey Verifiable Cloud, which entered beta and is the focus of the company's 2026 fundraising.

The architecture also matters for speed. Because Turnkey isolates a full key inside a single enclave rather than splitting it across parties, it can sign fast - the company claims 50 to 100 milliseconds, which it says is up to 100 times quicker than multi-party computation (MPC) rivals. In a world of trading bots and real-time onchain reactions, that gap is a selling point.

03 / What you can buildWallets, policies, and automation

The product line splits along who is using the wallet. Embedded Wallets drop non-custodial wallets straight into a consumer app, authenticated by email, phone, biometrics, or social login. Company Wallets handle programmatic signing at scale - payment orchestration, smart-contract management, and treasury flows. A Policy Engine, running inside the enclave, decides what any key is allowed to sign: which addresses, which contracts, which functions, up to which value. And Transaction Automation lets software fire transactions on its own, within those guardrails.

That last piece is where Turnkey is placing its next bet. As autonomous AI agents start to transact, they need a way to spend money that is bounded and auditable. Ferguson's analogy is blunt: "Just like employees need scoped credit cards to transact, agents need scoped wallets to transact." Turnkey wants to be the layer that issues those scoped wallets - and proves what they did afterward.

"Stablecoins are transforming how value moves online, and AI agents are upending traditional security assumptions. Turnkey builds verifiable infrastructure that secures both onchain transactions and the offchain systems they depend on." - Bryce Ferguson, CEO

04 / Who uses itThe invisible layer

Turnkey is designed to disappear. Its customers are the recognizable names; Turnkey is the plumbing underneath. World App (from Sam Altman-co-founded Tools for Humanity) uses it for programmable account recovery. Prediction market Polymarket, developer platform Alchemy, NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and stablecoin payments company Bridge (acquired by Stripe) all build on it. So do fintechs moving money in emerging markets, like Flutterwave.

The World App integration is a good illustration of what the infrastructure actually does in the wild. When a user needs to recover access, their recovery bundle is encrypted locally on their own device, while Turnkey holds the encryption keys inside secure enclaves behind user-authenticated access controls. The app gets a recovery experience its users can trust; Turnkey never sees the assets. That division of labor - the customer owns the product, Turnkey owns the cryptography - repeats across every logo on the roster.

The business model fits the invisibility. Turnkey charges per signature, not per wallet - so a customer with millions of dormant wallets pays only when those wallets actually do something. Pricing runs from a free tier (100 wallets, 25 transactions a month) through pay-as-you-go at $0.10 a signature, a $99-a-month Pro plan at half that rate, and enterprise deals that fall to fractions of a cent at volume.

05 / The moneyFrom a Sequoia seed to $65M

The cap table reads like a who's-who of crypto and fintech capital. Turnkey raised a $7.5 million seed led by Sequoia Capital, a $15 million Series A led by Lightspeed Faction and Galaxy Ventures, a $30 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto, and, in May 2026, a $12.5 million strategic round that added Archetype and - tellingly - Circle Ventures, the venture arm behind the USDC stablecoin. Total raised now sits above $65 million.

Each raise has funded the same thing: more engineers. The Series B was explicitly framed as money to grow the engineering team, and the 2026 round is aimed at the public launch of Verifiable Cloud. It is a picks-and-shovels story - Turnkey does not compete with the apps it powers; it sells them the hard part.

06 / The fieldWhere Turnkey sits

The wallet-infrastructure market is crowded and consolidating. Fireblocks and Privy anchor the MPC camp; Privy was acquired by Stripe in 2025, and Fireblocks bought Dynamic. Dfns, Magic, Web3Auth, and Coinbase's own Wallet-as-a-Service round out the field. Turnkey's pitch is architectural: a trusted-execution-environment approach instead of MPC, lower-level programmable signing that developers wire up themselves, per-signature pricing, and the verifiability angle that lets customers check its work rather than take it on faith. The counter-argument critics raise is dependence on a single enclave provider, AWS Nitro - a tradeoff Turnkey answers with its open-source, attestable stack.

For now, the numbers are pointing the right way: more than 50 million embedded wallets, millions of signatures a week, a spot on CNBC's 2025 list of the world's top fintech companies, and a set of customers building the parts of crypto - stablecoin payments, prediction markets, agentic transactions - that are actually growing.

The larger wager is on where trust is headed. Turnkey's mission, in its own words, is "to secure the open internet" by building infrastructure that is provable rather than merely promised. If stablecoins keep eating cross-border payments and software agents start moving money on their own, the question of who is holding the keys - and whether you can check their work - stops being a niche engineering concern and becomes the whole thing. Turnkey has spent four years quietly betting that it will.