Turnkey provides secure, scalable, and programmable crypto infrastructure for embedded wallets and on-chain transaction automation. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Turnkey co-founder and CEO Bryce Ferguson to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Bryce Ferguson’s Background
What is Bryce Ferguson’s background? Ferguson said:
“My focus has always been on building secure, flexible infrastructure to make crypto usable at scale.”
“Before Turnkey, I was the first product manager at Coinbase Custody, which Coinbase launched in 2017 to give institutional investors a more secure way to store their digital assets. Over four years, I helped scale it from 0 to over $100 billion in assets and led the launch of staking and governance products. After that, I ran crypto at Trade Republic, where I built and scaled their crypto MVP across Europe.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Ferguson shared:
“Jack Kearney and I met at Coinbase. We had often talked about starting a company, but we imagined we’d need to hide out for months to figure out what to build. That wasn’t the case at all.”
“Starting Turnkey happened very naturally – it was an extension of the work we had been doing previously. We had built key management infrastructure at Coinbase, and we had seen how the crypto industry was evolving. After Coinbase, when I was at Trade Republic and Jack was at Polychain, we hit our heads against the wall integrating with existing key management solutions. We experienced firsthand where this infrastructure was falling short and saw clear gaps in the market.”
“So in 2022, we got together and started asking, ‘should we explore this a little bit more?’ Soon after, we raised our seed round, brought together old colleagues from Coinbase, and started to build towards our vision of infrastructure that would let developers programmatically control wallets and transactions without compromising on security.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory leading the company so far? Ferguson reflected:
“Launching the product with our first customer was a monumental milestone for us.”
“When Jack and I outlined the vision for Turnkey in 2022, we had incredibly ambitious expectations for the infrastructure that we wanted to build. With our initial launch, we wanted to make sure our product set the foundation for long-term growth so we took our time to put that in place. It took us about a year from starting the company to launching because we took such a unique approach to key management infrastructure.”
“The initial launch in 2023 was a culmination of solving a lot of incredibly complex key management infrastructure problems, and it was also the moment we brought on our first customer, a company in the NFT space who believed in the tech we were building.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Ferguson explained:
“Turnkey provides secure, scalable, and programmable crypto infrastructure for embedded wallets and onchain transaction automation.
— Embedded Wallets: Many of the world’s fastest-growing crypto companies, from Moonshot to Infinex to Magic Eden, have used Turnkey to create millions of secure, non-custodial wallets on behalf of their customers, directly inside their app. No seed phrases. No confusing UX. Just seamless onboarding.”
— Transaction Automation: Turnkey lets teams automate onchain workflows at scale with fine-grained control policies. You can securely move assets, approve actions, or trigger transactions—all programmatically.”
“Turnkey is also built with enterprise-grade security, and on the foundations of:
— Trusted hardware: End-to-end private key generation, encryption, and access control within secure enclaves.
— Non-custodial wallets: Fully non-custodial, ensuring users have full control of their assets.
— Verifiable and open-source: Built with cryptographic security and a tamper-proof audit trail.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Ferguson and the team faced in building the company? Ferguson acknowledged:
“From the beginning, Turnkey took a very different approach to security. We leveraged secure enclaves, which were a little-used tool for crypto wallet security back in 2022. In our early days of selling Turnkey, there was a huge education component for prospective customers on what secure enclaves were, and how customers would benefit from this security approach.”
“In large part because of the work Turnkey did, secure enclaves are now becoming the default when people think about key management security.”
“If you want a deep dive into secure enclaves, our team wrote a lot about them in Turnkey’s 2025 whitepaper.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Ferguson noted:
“At Turnkey, we’re building the most secure, flexible, and scalable infrastructure that will power crypto wallets and onchain transactions for generations to come. Since launching in 2023, Turnkey has become the engine behind millions of embedded wallets and onchain transactions.”
“Since Turnkey’s launch, a few of the dozens of advancements and updates we’ve announced are:
— Open sourcing QuorumOS (QOS), the foundation of the first end-to-end verifiable computing environment operating at massive scale in production.
— Introducing an Embedded Wallet Kit, a starting point for anyone wanting to integrate embedded wallets into their product, providing pre-generated authentication UI components for a silky-smooth integration.
— Introducing a Solana Policy Engine, enabling developers to write granular policies around transaction amounts, addresses, and program interactions using Turnkey’s API – making your Solana wallet implementation even more powerful and secure.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Ferguson cited:
“A few things we’re proud of:
— Billions in assets secured across multiple blockchains, with real usage powering consumer and enterprise apps.
— Millions of transactions per week, reliably automated with our infrastructure.
— Open-sourced QuorumOS, our verifiable operating system for secure enclaves. It’s one of the few secure compute platforms that offers real-time auditability.
Customer Success Stories
When asking Ferguson about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Here are two examples of how Turnkey empowers developers to make crypto usable for everyday users.
Moonshot, the first app on the App Store that lets users buy & sell memes with Apple Pay, used Turnkey to implement:
- Zero-touch onboarding: Non-custodial wallets are created fully in the background as a user onboards.
- Easy web2 authentication: No seed phrases required. Users simply register with email or biometrics to easily authenticate transactions.
- Simple funding options: Moonshot seamlessly integrated Turnkey’s invisible, embedded wallets with MoonPay, allowing users to easily buy and sell crypto with Apple Pay.
Turnkey worked with DIMO, a secure, decentralized transportation network, to significantly improve the user experience and expand its reach to non-crypto-native users. With Turnkey, DIMO was able to:
- Reduce onboarding times by 90%
- Improve onboarding completion by 30%
- Slash account creation times by 85%
Funding
When asking Ferguson about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“Turnkey raised a $15 million Series A in October 2023 led by Lightspeed Faction and Galaxy Ventures. Prior to our Series A, Turnkey raised $7.5 million in Seed funding in May 2022 led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Anagram, and others.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Ferguson assessed:
“Most immediately, Turnkey falls into the blockchain technology market, with an estimated size of over $30 billion.”
“In the coming years, though, I see the addressable market being significantly larger. Already, we have billions of dollars in crypto transactions being powered by Turnkey’s infrastructure. As crypto becomes even more widely adopted, and Turnkey scales to work with more customers beyond the crypto-native, I anticipate processing trillions in crypto transactions.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Ferguson affirmed:
“The crypto industry moves very, very quickly. On the use case side, you have crypto companies focused on emerging areas like AI agents for crypto trading. On the adoption side, crypto companies can experience sharp spikes in users and transactions overnight — like Moonshot after $TRUMP launched.”
“Because the crypto industry moves so fast, infrastructure providers are too often a bottleneck. Turnkey is the opposite — the security, flexibility, and scalability built into our platform allows developers to build incredible products. Our platform is built in such a way that we are a future-proof option for developers that will allow them to evolve with the crypto industry.”
“One use case I’m particularly excited about is our work with Spectral, which is using Turnkey to create crypto wallets for AI Agents. I’m also bullish on the future of stablecoin payments, and Mural Pay is a great example of how we’re doing this today.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Ferguson concluded:
“Turnkey is scaling across the board — engineering, product, GTM. Our team is also continuing to invest in open source and verifiability, expanding our integrations, and building more modular infrastructure to support new use cases in payments, DeFi, AI agents, and more. Our long-term goal is for Turnkey to become the default infrastructure powering crypto transactions.”
