Turnkey – Secure Wallet Infrastructure for a Crypto Economy

TLDR - Turnkey is building the low-level crypto infrastructure that powers embedded wallets and automated on-chain transactions, enabling developers to spin up millions of wallets instantly and enforce granular security policies. By leveraging secure enclaves and a custom-built OS, Turnkey is on the path to offering the first fully verifiable backend for crypto key management which is a huge piece to be unlocked in the growing crypto space! While skepticism is natural, I’d encourage you to take a closer look at why this space matters. In the next sections, I’ll share why I’m working in crypto today, and why Turnkey, in particular, is such an essential player. The team is interested in new grads and interns particularly on The Niche across product and infrastructure teams. Would highly recommend submitting your interest to get connected with Jack, the CTO!

For today’s issue, we’re diving into an industry you’ve probably heard about but maybe haven’t had much direct exposure to: crypto. If you’ve followed the news on Capitol Hill, you likely caught the passage of the Genius Act, signed into law in July 2025, which established a regulatory framework for stablecoins, digital assets pegged 1:1 to fiat currency. Companies like Stripe (through its acquisitions of Bridge and Privy) and Coinbase (via its partnership with Amex to issue Bitcoin rewards cards) are increasingly leaning into crypto, signaling just how transformative this technology could be for payments. While skepticism is natural, I’d encourage you to take a closer look at why this space matters. In the next sections, I’ll share why I’m working in crypto today, and why Turnkey, in particular, is such an essential player.

Background: The Crypto Industry Today

Stablecoins have the potential to radically reshape how payments work. Today’s payment rails are dominated by a handful of card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover) that profit off interchange fees passed down to consumers. Behind the scenes, acquiring and issuing banks also take their cut, as do payment processors like Stripe or Toast. The system is even more painful for cross-border payments: moving money from Person A in one country to Person B in another can cost upward of 15% in fees. While these fees may seem hidden to us as merchants pay them to the payment processors, merchants actually increase the charge on their products so that the burden primarily falls on us as consumers.

By contrast, stablecoins enable near-instant, borderless transactions with minimal fees. They combine the benefits of blockchain (speed, transparency, security) with the stability of fiat (1:1 pegging). Unlike most cryptocurrencies, they’re designed to operate in a regulated environment while still lowering costs and unlocking new possibilities for global payments.

Introducing Turnkey

I first came across Turnkey through a friend at Sunflower Capital, which had invested early, before the company’s recent $30M Series B. Soon after, I connected with CTO Jack Kearney for a deep dive into Turnkey’s product and vision.

Jack’s journey is a big part of the story. After being captivated by Bitcoin’s whitepaper which he read in 2011, he joined Coinbase in 2016, where he became the first engineer on its crypto custodian product. (For context, a crypto custodian securely holds and manages digital assets on behalf of clients so think of it like a bank vault for crypto keys.) Later, at Polychain Capital, Jack saw how difficult it was to store and manage long-tail assets that weren’t widely supported by US-based custodians or exchanges. This meant that Polychain couldn't use existing companies to store these assets and, as a result, had to build their own custody tools. Those two experiences, the hands-on building of secure custodial infrastructure and the pain of asset management at scale, led him to co-found Turnkey in 2022.

Jack and Bryce thus founded Turnkey in 2022. The company positions itself as a low-level infrastructure provider, and provides the underlying crypto infrastructure developers need to securely integrate wallets and automate onchain transactions inside their apps. The company offers modular components that make it easy to create embedded crypto wallets for users and powers transaction automation on chain. What this means is that developers that use Turnkey can spin up millions of crypto wallets instantly for their users and enforce granular controls on permissions and spending limits within those wallets.

Flexible Key Management Under the Hood

Turnkey lets developers create fully customized wallet and payment experiences. When users want access to their wallet, Turnkey authenticates their identity, onboarding users with familiar authentication methods like OAuth, passkeys, email, and more. They create the underlying secure wallets and process/sign transactions at lightning speeds. The company also allows developers to set transaction limits, scope user permissions, etc. on their wallets to ensure granular approach and permissions.

How do they “program” granular permissions into their wallets to automate transactions? The company acts as a secure signer for whatever transactions your backend wants to send through the blockchain. As a developer, you generate a transaction (ex. “send 0.1 ETH every month from Wallet A to Wallet B”) and then hand it off to Turnkey. Turnkey securely holds the private key associated with those wallets, signs the transaction according to the rules you’ve set, and then your backend broadcasts it to the blockchain.

What’s the underlying technology that powers secure signing? Jack highlights Turnkey’s whitepaper, which for those interested in the space, would highly recommend reading! The broad strokes are that “we bifurcate our backend into trusted and untrusted spaces. Anything that could touch user private keys, modify or evaluate policies, or parse transactions is, without fail, considered to be in the trusted space. Everything in the trusted space is deployed on top of QOS (an OS we developed internally to run inside of the enclaves). QOS and these enclave applications are built (compiled) using stagex (a deterministic package manager originally developed at Turnkey).

Secure enclaves have a capability called remote attestation which allows you to remotely verify the specifics of what is running inside of them. Since all of the artifacts running there are built with stagex, if you have the source code you can compile that source code and then verify that it's running in an enclave. I believe that Turnkey will be the first company to have a completely verifiable backend. To be clear, some of this isn't quite in place yet, but we're very very close to having everything running be independently verifiable.”

At the heart of crypto, blockchains, and wallets is a private key. Whoever holds the private key controls the funds. That’s why security models for key management are so critical: if keys are stolen, or even accidentally exposed, funds can be irreversibly lost. Turnkey securely holds your wallet key, but as Jack has explained above, their whitepaper outlines a fully verifiable backend where you don’t have to just trust Turnkey’s word that a transaction is secure; rather, you can cryptographically prove that the exact code you audited is what’s securing your keys.

Authorization and Policy

We also wanted to highlight Turnkey’s authorization and policy layer. You can create fine-grained rules, like limiting a specific API key to be able to interact with certain smart contracts (smart contracts are programmable layers on top of the blockchain that allow for us to code processes, limits, and transactions) . For example, if a user wanted to pay a monthly subscription, they could define a policy where Wallet A automatically sends payments to Wallet B every month, but never exceeds a set limit (technically not completely feasible yet but Turnkey is developing this capability quite soon!).

And unlike other players that focus on full-stack, out-of-the-box solutions, Jack analogizes Turnkey to be like AWS, offering flexibility and modularity to deeply technical developers, while competitors like Privy (recently just acquired by Stripe) resemble Vercel, prioritizing ease of setup over deep customization.

Why Now? Why Not During the Crypto Boom in the 2010s?

One question that kept bothering me was why now? Why develop Turnkey in 2022 and not during the 2010s when the crypto boom was at an all-time high, granted crypto is also booming now. Jack notes that Turnkey is only possible now because the technology needed to build it simply didn’t exist back in 2017. At that time, most crypto experiences relied on external wallets like MetaMask, which made user experiences clunky and fragmented (as an aside, MetaMask is an example of a non-custodial wallet because once you create a wallet, you as the user store your own keys and information. There is no third-party source that stores your keys and enables easy authentication through OAuth). Developers were focused on individual “lego” components like Uniswap, rather than delivering seamless, end-to-end products at that time. By contrast, Turnkey’s bet now is to enable embedded wallets directly within apps, giving teams control over the entire user journey and a certain modularity that was missing back then. Crucially, advances like AWS Nitro Enclaves (launched in 2020/2021) now provide the secure infrastructure necessary to make this model viable, something earlier embedded wallet solutions like Bitski or Magic lacked.

Turnkey’s Position in the Crypto Landscape

Stablecoins are poised to radically reshape payments by cutting out layers of intermediaries and fees that dominate today’s rails. Where card networks, banks, and processors like Stripe or Toast take slices of every transaction, and where cross-border transfers can swallow up 15% or more in fees, stablecoins offer near-instant, borderless transactions with minimal costs, all while maintaining the stability of fiat. For consumers, that means lower prices at checkout; for merchants and builders, it means new ways to design payment experiences that aren’t beholden to legacy infrastructure.

Turnkey sits at the heart of this shift by providing the infrastructure layer that makes stablecoin payments programmable and scalable. While stablecoins solve the “money” side of the equation, Turnkey solves the “storage”: secure, embedded wallets and automated transaction signing that let developers integrate a storage system for stablecoin payments directly into their apps. This means a platform can instantly spin up wallets for every user that wants to get paid out in stablecoins, a payments app can automate recurring transfers across borders, and an AI agent can transact on the chain without a human in the loop, all while maintaining enterprise-grade security and granular control.

In short: stablecoins unlock the possibility of cheaper, faster payments, and Turnkey provides the storage via wallets and the customization that developers need to actually bring that vision to life.

The Team at Turnkey

Right now, the Turnkey team is largely composed of senior infrastructure- / security-leaning engineers. As the team grows, Jack says they’ll be building more components that touch various blockchain ecosystems, including an on-chain authorization layer in smart contract wallets, systems to track user balances, and swap/yield functionality directly into their SDK. “We're looking for extremely autonomous and driven individuals to help build our product, scale our infrastructure, and secure the billions of dollars that flow through Turnkey.”

Jack indicates that the team is primarily hiring for new grads and potential interns that would be a part of their product engineering team and/or their infrastructure team. Let us know which side you might be interested in when you submit your interest. For the product organization, the interview pipeline would be as follows:

1. 30 minutes with Greg Clayman on background, interests, and Turnkey
2. Take home project that takes ~2 hours
3. 60 minutes of review and extension of the take home project with a Product Engineering
4. 30 minute call with Raheel Ahmed (Head of Product)

I’d highly recommend Turnkey, not only because through talking with Jack, I see a clear vision in how he’s crafting Turnkey’s vision but also his knowledge within the crypto space. In the next coming weeks, I might also publish some background on crypto infrastructure and the system itself if people are interested in reading!