When Andy Yakovenko founded Solana in 2017, his mission was to deliver Web3 performance at Web2 scale, making blockchain applications fast, cheap, and seamless enough for mainstream adoption.
Now today with 2,500+ developers active monthly on the platform, the Solana network continues to grow and build on that vision.
But even with Solana’s performance and ecosystem advantages, dApps built on the platform can only succeed if users can interact with them securely and seamlessly through wallets that match Solana’s speed and scalability.
Wallets that fall short can create friction, slow adoption, and undermine the trust that Solana’s ecosystem is built on.
This article evaluates leading Wallet-as-a-Service providers on three key factors for building high-performance Solana applications. Then it shows why Turnkey offers a uniquely strong foundation for building Solana dApps at scale when compared to the competition.
How to assess Solana wallet infrastructure
When evaluating wallet providers, it’s helpful to look at three broad characteristics of their infrastructure: security, flexibility, and scalability.
How each provider implements and delivers on these dimensions reveals a great deal about the reliability and developer experience they can offer.
- Security defines how private keys are generated, stored, and used.
- Flexibility reflects how easily developers can design onboarding flows and integrate wallets into their applications.
- Scalability ensures the infrastructure can keep pace with Solana’s high throughput and expanding user base.
Together, these factors determine how well wallet infrastructure can safeguard keys, support decentralized applications, and deliver the seamless user experiences that drive adoption.
Let’s look at these more in depth:
Security: Wallets that are secure, verified, and trusted
In 2024, the Solana-based trading platform DEXX was exploited, with at least 8,620 wallets compromised and $25M–$30M in assets lost. The breach, traced to weaknesses in private key management, highlights why consistent security practices are critical to wallet infrastructure.
When it comes to digital wallets, if private keys are exposed, assets are at risk. This is because the private key is the cryptographic credential that proves ownership of funds and authorizes every transaction onchain. Anyone who gains access to a private key can access and move assets connected to it without restriction.
Developers need confidence that raw private keys never leave secure environments and that wallet creation happens with the same speed and efficiency as Solana itself. The best Solana wallets minimize these risks by isolating key material and authorizing transactions through verifiable processes.
Flexibility: wallets that adapt to users and applications
Flexibility is just as important. Wallet infrastructure must adapt to different application needs and user expectations.
For some users, that means onboarding flows that feel blockchain-invisible, where account creation and transaction signing happen in the background. For others, it means the option to connect through browser wallets or hardware wallets they already know and trust.
The best Solana wallets give developers the ability to shape these flows without adding complexity. They provide the tools to build onboarding that feels app-native and intuitive while still preserving the principles of digital ownership.
By supporting a wide range of experiences, flexible infrastructure reduces friction and helps dApps reach a broader audience.
Scalability: wallets that grow with your application
Scalability ensures wallet infrastructure can keep pace as Solana applications grow.
A dApp may start with a small user base, but as adoption increases and transaction volumes rise, the wallet must handle higher loads without slowing down onboarding, transaction signing, or user management.
Infrastructure that can’t scale becomes a bottleneck, undermining the very speed and affordability that make Solana attractive to developers in the first place. By contrast, scalable wallets maintain performance under pressure, keeping applications smooth and reliable even during periods of rapid growth.
The best Solana dApps: How five wallet providers compare
Below, we compare how five WaaS companies address these standards in practice so that developers can choose the infrastructure that best aligns with their needs.
These criteria can reveal how different providers approach the fundamentals of wallet design and highlight where potential tradeoffs, if any, may impact their applications.
1. Turnkey
Security
Turnkey’s security architecture is built around a type of trusted execution environments (TEEs) known as secure enclaves that ensure raw keys never leave a fully isolated hardware environment. Transactions can only be signed inside the enclave, and policies are enforced within that same boundary.
Unlike other providers, the code running in Turnkey’s enclave uses remote attestation.. This means developers can independently verify what’s running, removing the need to rely on infrastructure trust alone.
This non-custodial model shifts security from assumption to proof, giving developers and wallet holders confidence that protections aren’t just promised but can be proven.
Flexibility
For developers, Turnkey offers flexibility by reducing wallet infrastructure down to composable primitives. Its complete tool stack, including SDKs, APIs, and policy-based controls, equips builders to design and extend wallet functionality with precision.
Developers can set transaction rules such as spending limits, whitelisted addresses, or DeFi restrictions, all enforced at the infrastructure layer. This foundation makes it straightforward to support embedded wallets, app-native flows, or advanced integrations while maintaining the same level of security.
Scalability
Turnkey’s architecture is designed for scale. Its enclave-native system supports high transaction throughput and multi-chain operations, including Solana.
By separating signing and parsing from transaction broadcasting, it helps developers manage large user bases without bottlenecks, aligning with Solana’s high-performance design.
2. Privy
Security
Privy secures wallets using Shamir’s Secret Sharing (SSS), splitting each key into multiple parts. One share (the TEE share) is held permanently inside a trusted execution environment, while the auth share is tied to user authentication and delivered to the enclave at signing time. An optional recovery share can also be configured. This ensures that reconstruction only occurs within the TEE, reducing single-point failures.
Where Privy is less clear is when it comes to policy enforcement. Their documentation confirms that policies are evaluated inside the enclave, but it does not detail how those policies are imported. If policies could be rewritten or bypassed before reaching the enclave, enforcement would be weaker than it appears. Developers should factor in this ambiguity when weighing Privy’s overall trust model.
Flexibility
Privy offers embedded wallets tied to email, SMS, passkeys, or social logins. It also supports external wallets, allowing hybrid onboarding flows. However, its tooling is more centered on user identity and login options than on composable primitives, which can limit how deeply developers customize wallet behavior.
Scalability
Privy scales well across embedded wallets and provides APIs, webhooks, and analytics. Still, its model leans heavily on hosted components, meaning developers may have less control over performance tuning compared to infrastructure designed to separate signing, parsing, and broadcasting.
3. Dynamic
Security
Dynamic uses Turnkey for its key generation and signing layers for its existing customers and is now defaulting new customers over to a new MPC model.
The new wallet architecture is built on threshold signature schemes (TSS-MPC), where key material is split across multiple nodes. Signing requires quorum approval, which their backend helps coordinate.
While MPC ensures that no single node ever reconstructs the full key, the cryptographic schemes it relies on are relatively new. Unlike older standards that have been tested in production for decades, these protocols have not yet been fully battle-hardened over time.
For example, researchers are still finding zero-day vulnerabilities that could impact certain MPC wallets.
Flexibility
Dynamic gives developers a flexible way to embed wallets directly into applications. Keys are distributed across nodes and coordinated through Dynamic’s backend, which streamlines onboarding and reduces the need to manage wallet logic in-house. Customization is limited to what Dynamic supports, and deeper policy or transaction workflows must fit within the parameters of their managed system.
Scalability
Dynamic is designed to scale at the application layer, handling large volumes of user sessions and wallet connections for consumer-facing dApps. For workloads requiring highly customizable signing logic, Dynamic’s design may need to be paired with infrastructure that exposes lower-level controls.
4. Para
Security
Para relies on end-user devices to hold portions of the private key, with each device storing its own share locally. Their backend orchestrates multi-party computation (MPC) to coordinate these shares when a transaction needs to be signed.
Para also employs distributed key generation, with one share residing on the user’s device and another in a hardware security module (HSM). While HSMs provide strong security guarantees, they are slow and difficult to scale, which can limit throughput in high-volume environments.
Flexibility
Para focuses on universal wallets and cross-app portability, which can simplify onboarding across ecosystems. That flexibility is attractive for users, but developers may trade off fine-grained control for the convenience of a shared model.
Scalability
Given their use of HSMs, Para’s claims of cross-chain scalability are difficult to evaluate. While they suggest the infrastructure is built for growth, public data on throughput, uptime, or real-world stress tests is sparse, making it hard for developers to judge whether it can keep pace with Solana’s transaction demands.
5. Dfns
Security
Dfns distributes private keys across a network of MPC nodes so that no single machine handles the full key at once. Signing requires quorum approval, coordinated through their infrastructure. This reduces reliance on any one node, but concentrates trust in Dfns’ backend to enforce policies and prevent misuse.
The enforcement logic of their policy engine seems to reside in their backend infrastructure. This creates a trust dependency: you rely on Dfns’ backend both to apply the correct policy rules and to prevent unauthorized requests from ever reaching the MPC signing nodes.
Flexibility
Dfns offers flexible key management options through its Key Deployment Service, which uses MPC to split private keys into shares. These shares can be anchored in HSMs, enclaves, or on-prem environments, giving institutions multiple ways to balance scalability, compliance, and security without ever concentrating the full key in one place.
Dfns supports custodial and non-custodial models with APIs, entitlement management, and programmable authorization. Developers gain significant control over governance flows, though the approach is heavier than lightweight primitives that can be directly composed into wallet logic.
Scalability
Dfns reports operating at large scale, with millions of wallets created and tens of billions of dollars in assets managed through its platform. The service also advertises high uptime figures, though, as with other hosted MPC services, developers ultimately rely on the provider’s infrastructure for performance and availability. MPC itself can introduce added latency and remains less battle-tested cryptographically than enclave-only approaches,
Turnkey is fundamentally different wallet infrastructure, and that’s good for Solana Developers
When it comes to wallet security and infrastructure design, Turnkey takes a fundamentally different approach than its competitors.
- Non-custodial key management
Raw keys are generated and used entirely inside secure enclaves, ensuring end users maintain full control. Policies are also enforced within the enclave, guaranteeing that transaction rules are applied with the same cryptographic protections as the keys themselves.
- Security you can prove
All other providers ask you to trust their infrastructure. But with end-to-end remote attestation, Turnkey shows you the underlying code and verifies its running in the enclave. That level of transparency and verifiability is unique to Turnkey, and offered by few, if any, other wallet providers. - Seamless integration
A complete developer tool stack — including APIs, SDKs, and policy controls — makes it easy to embed wallets, define transaction rules, and integrate onboarding directly into applications. - Scalable architecture
Designed for throughput at Solana’s speed, Turnkey separates signing, parsing, and broadcasting to prevent bottlenecks. Its infrastructure is built to handle growing user bases and transaction volumes without slowing down.
Turnkey delivers everything Solana developers need in a Wallet-as-a-Service provider. By combining top-tier security with a robust, developer-friendly platform, Turnkey gives Solana builders the foundation to focus on creating the crypto of tomorrow.
In short, if you’re asking what is the best Solana wallet infrastructure for developers, Turnkey stands out. It provides the security, scalability, and seamless integration that Solana dApps need to succeed, all without forcing developers to become wallet engineers themselves.
Turnkey: Building the future of Solana dApps
Solana’s speed, affordability, and thriving ecosystem make it one of the best blockchains for developers to build on today. But no dApp can reach its full potential without the right wallet infrastructure. The best Solana wallets combine non-custodial security, seamless integration, and scalable infrastructure to deliver trust and usability at scale.
Turnkey brings all of these elements together in a WaaS platform purpose-built for developers. By choosing Turnkey, Solana builders can give their users a secure, transparent, and effortless wallet experience, while freeing themselves to focus on innovation. That’s how the next generation of decentralized applications will grow, and why wallet infrastructure is just as important as the chain itself.
Try Turnkey today.
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