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To our customers,
Across the industry, 2026 has been an exceptionally active year for both conventional cyber incidents and crypto/Web3 exploits. These developments are an important reminder that securing onchain assets means protecting more than just keys. It means securing every system, credential and decision involved in moving money.
On October 29, Binance lost about $6.3 billion in the largest crypto theft on record. In September, attackers exploited a compromised backend to trigger Bitget's authorization process, stealing $387.5 million. And in April, Drift lost about $285 million after attackers convinced signers to pre-sign transactions that later transferred admin control.
Four of the year's five largest thefts came down to either how keys were protected or how transactions were approved. At Turnkey, we focus not only on how to protect against today's attacks, but how to prepare for what's coming next.
What 2026 told us
- A few well-funded attackers cause most of the losses. Crypto hacks have taken a record $8.7 billion this year, and TRM Labs attributes about $7.4 billion of it to North Korea, most of that from Binance.
- The software everyone depends on can fail at once. In one October week the industry called "Black October," weak certificate keys at eMudhra, the PHP2Shell flaws and a hijacked LiteLLM release all landed at once.
- Attackers are increasingly using AI to develop and execute exploits. Google's threat intelligence group saw the first zero-day exploit it believes was developed with AI, and in another case it tracked, an attacker used an AI chatbot and agent instructions to compromise thousands of credentials in under six hours.
- An agent should never sign in as its owner. Major US banks began blocking AI agents they found inside customer accounts, signed in with their owners' passwords.
- Quantum risk is closer than it seemed. Google Quantum AI estimated that breaking the elliptic curve signatures behind Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana could take far fewer quantum resources than previously believed.
Security covers far more than keys
Security and verifiability have been Turnkey's foundation since day one. One of our founding principles is to assume everything is compromised until proven secure. That’s why we protect the entire signing process around the key: every change request must be signed by a user-held authenticator, validated against your policies, and processed inside secure enclaves that cryptographically prove which code they run.
This year reinforced why that matters, and we’ve expanded our capabilities to meet the evolving challenges. Teams can now securely provision non-Turnkey credentials to AI agents, store API keys that unlock access across their entire stack, and run code that determines where money moves.
We’ve brought these use cases into the same trusted infrastructure through two new capabilities:
- Managed Secrets brings enclave security and policy-gated access to API keys and passwords.
- Turnkey Verifiable Cloud runs your own code inside secure enclaves, where every change needs approval from several people.
The principle stays the same: sensitive material lives inside secure enclaves, every use is checked against policies you set, and you can verify the code that enforces all of it.
Where security is heading
Three shifts will shape what we build next.
Agents will act for us more often. An agent can be fooled by what it reads, so its limits have to live where its inputs cannot reach them: in policy, enforced before anything is signed or any secret is released.
AI will keep finding flaws faster than teams can fix them. We plan for that by keeping our attack surface small. Our secure enclaves have no persistent storage, no interactive access and no external networking, and our software builds reproducibly and is attested before it runs.
Quantum risk is real, but not yet urgent. Turnkey is not fully post-quantum today, mainly because the networks we support still rely on elliptic curve signatures. We're actively preparing for that future and have outlined our approach
Where our protections stop
These are limits of wallet infrastructure as a whole, not just ours. Security is shared, and the strongest setups are the ones where we each do our part.
- Like all wallet-as-a-service providers, our policies only see what passes through our infrastructure. A transaction signed somewhere else, including with a key you have exported, never reaches them.
- The root quorum bypasses policies by design, so a root quorum of one is a single point of failure, however carefully everything else is set up.
- Enclaves stop a key from being copied, but they cannot hide a public key that is already onchain. If quantum computers ever break elliptic curve signatures, those keys are exposed wherever they are held.
Because those limits sit outside any single provider’s control, following are some practical steps that you can take on your side of the shared boundary.
What we recommend before the end of the year
- Raise your root quorum above one.
- Give every application, service and AI agent its own non-root user, following least privilege: only the permissions it needs, and never your login.
- Write policies for every wallet that moves money: approved destinations, value limits and more than one approver for large transfers.
- Move the API keys and passwords for your other non-Turnkey services out of environment variables and into Managed Secrets.
- Require passkeys for anyone who approves transactions.
- Patch for Black October: update PHP and GitLab, apply the TLS updates for the eMudhra keys, and never disable certificate verification to clear an error.
- Know which of your addresses already show their public keys onchain, and decide which funds you would move first if quantum risk grows.
Most of this year's largest attacks had a moment where one system or one person could act alone. Our job is to remove those moments, for your keys and for everything else you trust us with.
If you want help with any of this, my team is here: reach us through dashboard support chat or [email protected], or your shared Slack channel if you are an Enterprise customer.
Bryce Ferguson, CEO and Co-founder of Turnkey
