Programmability is crypto’s core unlock and its biggest challenge.

As part of the original DeFi story, programmable keys and signatures let apps borrow-lend, rebalance yield, and manage liquidity on AMMs without needing a human to approve each action. Since then, crypto apps have continued to pull more control away from humans and gain more autonomy to move money and change state on their own.

From prediction markets settling outcomes faster than traditional news, to agents opening bank accounts and paying for compute, and stablecoins moving money with leaner trust models, crypto’s most valuable applications all push the envelope on what software can do by itself.

But that’s always been a double-edged sword.

Software needs to hold keys without leaking them, even as adversarial agents press harder on value-bearing apps. It needs to act within the bounds a human may have set days or weeks earlier. It needs to prove, after state settles, that what it executed matches what was authorized. And it needs to do all of this at the volume and latency of modern fintech, not under the lab-like conditions that crypto has settled for until now.

To handle all of this, app-layer teams converge on similar stacks of HSMs, policy engines, signing services, attestation flows, and other infrastructure meant to make programmable systems safe enough to use. And that’s where the tradeoff shows up. 

As teams pursue programmability, they often end up sacrificing verifiability. The stacks they construct might end up being theoretically secure, but if they become black boxes in the process, then users and builders are stuck trusting rather than verifying. Builders can’t verify whether a custodian is running the right code, whether policies are enforced correctly, or whether the right actor is signing a transaction.

At that point, the specific components matter less than the ability to prove what the system is actually doing. And without that proof, programmability loses its value and just becomes another attack vector.

This is the gap that Turnkey closes. 

At its core, Turnkey does verifiable key management: programmable signing, embedded wallets, and policy enforcement that all run inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) on top of their open-source OS for TEEs, QuorumOS. The whole trusted computing base is externally attestable, which means customers don't have to take Turnkey's word that the right agents and code are running on the right hardware. Every part of every step that onchain apps perform, from key generation to policy enforcement, can be proven and attested to in real time.

Polymarket uses Turnkey to keep markets moving. Phantom, Magic Eden, and Moonshot all utilize Turnkey to give millions of users wallets that feel like accounts. Bridge, Mural, and Squads lean on the policy engine for payments. Superstate and other RWA platforms use Turnkey’s institutional key management to secure institutional flows. And Flutterwave leverages Turnkey’s embedded wallets to power $30B+ a year in payments and remittances across Africa, Europe, the UK, and North America.

The next act goes beyond wallets for apps. With Turnkey Verifiable Cloud, Turnkey is opening up its verifiable foundations to other builders so they can run their own applications on the same enclave stack. The same attestable environment that currently signs a Polymarket trade can run anything that requires verifiability, like a model eval, a transaction parser, an oracle, an exchange matching engine, or a chain-abstraction cosigner.

All of crypto’s real use cases collapse into the same core bet: software that can hold value and act on it, inside rails that are open, composable, and verifiable, will eat a surprising amount of what currently runs through humans and legacy intermediaries. That bet only works if the connective tissue exists, and if it gets used. Turnkey is building the part where a signer, a policy, and a piece of verifiable compute can be wired together in an afternoon instead of a quarter, while making sure every step of the chain can be independently checked.

We first came across Turnkey in 2024 while trading on Moonshot. The entire experience, from creating an account to actually using the product, was exactly what you’d expect out of a modern mobile app: smooth, snappy, and seamless. We asked the Moonshot founders about their wallet infrastructure, and they pointed us to Turnkey. 

Turnkey’s founders, Bryce Ferguson and Jack Kearney, are Coinbase alumni who have been working together for years. Bryce was the first product manager at Coinbase Custody, where he helped scale assets under custody from 0 to $100B and led the launch of Coinbase’s staking and governance products. Jack was a Coinbase engineer dating back to 2016 before he joined Polychain as CTO in 2019.

Turnkey is a natural progression for Bryce and Jack, and the pair have a uniquely powerful set of technical depth, product chops, and a strong working relationship that’s rare to find. Bryce, Jack, and the formidable team at Turnkey are now elevating programmable infrastructure and continuing to bolster New York’s role as a core hub of the onchain economy.

We're thrilled to invest in Turnkey's $12.5M strategic round alongside Circle Ventures and existing backers, including Bain Capital Crypto, Lightspeed Faction, Galaxy Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Variant. 
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Turnkey: https://www.turnkey.com/ 
Turnkey on X: https://x.com/turnkeyhq
Bryce Ferguson: https://x.com/sadbryce
‍Jack Kearney: https://x.com/whojackjones