In 2025, Dune Analytics and Addressable recorded 33 million embedded wallet swaps in a single month, highlighting embedded wallets as a foundation for modern DeFi development solutions that reduce friction, boost engagement, and improve usability
Traditionally wallets have lived outside the application, functioning as browser extensions or separate tools layered onto the user experience. Embedded wallets change that model by bringing wallet capabilities directly into the product.
Today’s embedded wallets extend far beyond basic crypto transactions. The most effective implementations support full DeFi experiences that feel cohesive, intuitive, and native by default. By bringing advanced DeFi capabilities directly into the application, embedded wallets transform financial actions into product features rather than external workflows.
Embedded wallets also change how DeFi security is enforced. Signing, authorization, and policy controls move closer to the application itself, allowing teams to define guardrails, reduce attack surface, and enforce intent at the moment transactions are created. This makes it possible to scale DeFi functionality while maintaining predictable behavior and stronger security guarantees.
This article explores the DeFi development solutions emerging around embedded wallets and how teams are using them to build more engaging, full-featured products.
Why embedded wallets sit at the forefront of modern DeFi development solutions
Instead of treating wallets and protocols as external destinations, embedded wallets turn them into native capabilities that users access without leaving the product. This directly impacts engagement.
When users can move between actions without interruption, session depth increases and applications gain more opportunities to guide behavior through UX rather than documentation.
This shift gives applications several immediate advantages:
- Wallets become interactive surfaces rather than passive storage
- Users remain inside the product while trading, earning, or participating
- Financial actions feel like product features instead of protocol interactions
Embedded wallets allow developers to design workflows around real user intent. Complexity stays in the infrastructure layer, while the experience remains cohesive and approachable.
At a higher level, embedded wallets shift control back to the application layer. Teams own the end-to-end experience, expose financial primitives intentionally, and build products that feel native by default. This is why embedded wallets are not just an incremental improvement, but a defining pattern for modern fintech and web app experiences.
"Wallets are becoming self-contained superapps: The clearest trend is vertical expansion where wallets now embed swaps, staking, quests, bridging, and even game discovery. Rather than simply storing assets, they connect, curate, route, and increasingly own the user journey, blurring the line between tool and platform.”
– Wallet Report V2, Dune analytics
5 DeFi primitives developers are embedding in their applications today
In practice, embedded wallet experiences for DeFi tend to center on core capabilities that focus on user intent: fiat-to-crypto onramps, earning on assets, trading and liquidity access, and participation in application-native markets.
Below are five capabilities that developers are actively using today:
- Native onramps
Onramps allow users to move from fiat to onchain value directly inside the application, eliminating the need to acquire assets elsewhere before engaging. This shortens time-to-value and makes every other DeFi interaction immediately reachable.
- Interoperability
Interoperability extends the value of native onramps by ensuring that once assets enter the application, they are not confined to a single chain or protocol.
With interoperable wallet infrastructure, users can move value across networks, access liquidity wherever it exists, and participate in a broader set of DeFi opportunities without managing bridges or external tools. This allows applications to present cross-chain activity as a seamless, in-app experience while abstracting complexity away from the user.
- Staking and yield
Users expect idle balances to be productive, whether that means staking, lending, or participating in yield strategies. With staking and native yield built directly into the application, users deposit assets once and continue engaging with the product while value accrues in the background.
For developers, embedded staking and yield turn earning into a persistent feature rather than a separate destination. Assets remain inside the application, rewards compound over time, and users are encouraged to return to monitor performance, adjust positions, or redeploy capital. This creates a low-friction earn experience that supports long-term engagement without requiring constant user action.
- Swaps and trades
Swaps, routing, and liquidity aggregation are actions users perform repeatedly, and they are also the moments where friction is most costly. Embedding these capabilities allows applications to keep users in context, present better defaults, and remove the need to navigate external DEX interfaces or centralized exchanges.
For developers, embedded swaps help position the application as the primary place where trading happens. By keeping these high-frequency interactions in-app, teams can deliver smoother experiences, guide user behavior through design, and strengthen long-term engagement.
- Participation in application-native markets:
A newer development in embedded wallets in DeFi is for the app to directly participate in markets on behalf of the user. Prediction markets, event-based trading, and other participatory mechanisms turn DeFi into an engagement layer rather than just a balance sheet.
With embedded wallets, dApps can surface these features directly inside the application while relying on external wallet infrastructure and prediction market protocols to handle signing, settlement, and market mechanics. The application owns the experience, while the underlying infrastructure does the heavy lifting.
These interactions encourage repeat visits, longer sessions, and ongoing involvement tied to real-world or in-app outcomes. Users return to monitor positions, respond to changing conditions, and participate over time, all without leaving the product experience.
While these categories support different engagement patterns, they also rely on the same underlying foundations. Embedded wallets handle identity, signing, and authorization, allowing developers to compose these primitives into cohesive workflows without exposing protocol complexity.
Turnkey recipes for building these embedded wallet DeFi development solutions
Rather than forcing teams to wire together bespoke wallet logic for each feature, Turnkey provides a common signing and authorization layer that integrates with many DeFi services and works consistently across protocols. This allows developers to compose DeFi primitives into end-to-end workflows while relying on best-in-class providers for liquidity, yield, and market mechanics.
Embedded wallets as the execution layer
Turnkey’s embedded wallets act as the execution layer for DeFi applications, combining user identity, transaction signing, and policy enforcement into a single surface. This keeps authorization decisions tied directly to signing, reducing complexity and minimizing trust boundaries.
By keeping signing and policy enforcement in the same boundary, applications can safely automate swaps, staking, and participation while maintaining clear constraints on what wallets are allowed to do.
Source: Turnkey embedded wallets quickstart
Native onramps as the entry point
Native fiat-to-crypto onramps are often the first embedded wallet DeFi interaction users encounter. They allow users to move from zero balance to onchain value directly inside the application, without relying on external exchanges or wallets.
Turnkey supports native onramps through integrations with Coinbase and MoonPay, enabling applications to embed compliant funding flows directly into the product experience.
Users can enter with fiat and immediately fund their wallets with the crypto of their choice, including stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, and other onchain assets.
By combining embedded wallets with native onramps, applications shorten time-to-value and remove one of the biggest sources of friction in DeFi. Once assets enter the wallet, every other DeFi interaction becomes immediately reachable within the same experience boundary.
Source: Turnkey fiat on-ramp documentation
Multichain wallet infrastructure for interoperability
Turnkey is network-agnostic at the signing layer. It operates directly on cryptographic primitives rather than chain-specific abstractions, supporting the two dominant curves used across modern blockchains:
- secp256k1
Used by Ethereum, all EVM-compatible chains (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain, etc.), and Bitcoin-style networks. - ed25519
Used by Solana and other high-performance chains built on EdDSA signing.
This allows Turnkey to sign transactions for any network built on these curves, without requiring chain-specific wallet implementations.
Because signing is handled at the curve level, Turnkey can support new networks as they emerge with minimal friction. The same core wallet infrastructure, key management, and signing logic applies across chains, ensuring consistent security guarantees regardless of the underlying network.
The result is an architecture where developers are not locked into a single chain or forced to rebuild wallet logic as they expand. Applications can sign on any supported curve, enforce policies where they matter most, and evolve their cross-chain footprint over time without re-architecting their security or authorization model.
This foundation allows developers to compose DeFi primitives into cohesive, in-app experiences that scale cleanly as products grow.
Source: Turnkey’s Multichain support page
Yield and earning integrations
Turnkey supports a range of yield and earning integrations that allow applications to embed productive asset flows directly into the product.
Lending and supply-side yield are enabled through integrations with Aave and Morpho, allowing users to earn on idle balances without leaving the app. More expansive yield strategies are supported through Yield.xyz, which abstracts strategy selection and deployment behind a simpler interface. And native staking flows are enabled through Breeze.
Across all of these integrations, Turnkey handles wallet infrastructure and signing, while yield providers focus on protocol logic and returns.
Sources: Morpho, Aave, Breeze, Yield.xyz cookbooks
Swaps, trading, and liquidity access
Turnkey also enables embedded trading and liquidity access across chains.
On Solana, best-price swaps are supported through Jupiter. On EVM networks, liquidity routing is handled through 0x, while cross-chain swaps and routing are enabled through LI.FI.
In these workflows, Turnkey is responsible for secure signing and transaction orchestration. Liquidity providers handle pricing, routing, and execution. The application owns the user experience, presenting swaps as native product features rather than external handoffs.
Sources: Jupiter, 0x, and LI.FI cookbooks
Participation and application-native markets
Participation represents a newer but rapidly growing DeFi primitive. Turnkey’s integration with Polymarket shows how applications can embed prediction market participation directly into their products.
In this model, markets and settlement live on Polymarket, while Turnkey provides wallet infrastructure and signing. The application controls discovery, interaction, and monitoring, allowing users to participate in markets without leaving the app.
This separation of responsibilities lets developers add participatory features without rebuilding market mechanics, while still delivering a cohesive, in-app experience.
Source: Polymarket builders cookbook
Best practices for embedding DeFi securely and at scale
These same embedded DeFi features that drive engagement can also increase transaction volume, automation, and latency sensitivity.
Turnkey is built to meet these requirements in production by combining policy-driven authorization, hardware-backed security, verifiable execution, and low-latency signing.
Policy-driven signing with verifiable execution
Turnkey applies policy controls directly at the signature layer, allowing developers to define what a wallet is allowed to sign, under what conditions, and within what limits. Scope, value, and behavior can all be constrained without blocking legitimate actions.
These policies are enforced inside trusted execution environments (TEEs), isolating private keys, signing logic, and authorization rules from the rest of the system. Because signing happens inside a verifiable enclave, applications can prove that transactions were authorized and executed according to policy.
This combination of policy enforcement and verifiable execution reduces attack surface while enabling safe automation at scale.
Flexibility without sacrificing performance
Turnkey is also designed to be flexible at the application layer while keeping security and authorization consistent underneath. Developers can introduce new DeFi integrations, compose new workflows, and evolve product behavior without changing how keys are managed or how signing is enforced.
At the same time, performance matters. Swaps, liquidations, and market participation are latency-sensitive actions. Turnkey’s enclave-based signing is optimized for low latency, allowing applications to execute transactions quickly even as policy checks and authorization rules are applied. This ensures that embedded wallet DeFi products remain responsive under real-world conditions.
Choosing infrastructure that scales with your product
Embedded wallet DeFi solutions increase transaction frequency, automation, and long-lived workflows.
Production infrastructure must support:
- High-frequency swaps and liquidity access
- Continuous yield operations and reward management
- Event-driven participation and settlement
Because every one of these actions depends on fast, secure signing, wallet infrastructure becomes central to both user experience and operational reliability. By combining low-latency execution, policy-driven authorization, and verifiable security guarantees, Turnkey enables embedded wallet DeFi products to scale without becoming operational liabilities.
Turnkey: DeFi as product infrastructure, not external tooling
With Turnkey, staking, swapping, yield, and participation are embedded directly into the application, not bolted on as external workflows.
For fintech and web3 developers, this is not just about accessing protocols. It is about owning the signing layer, enforcing clear authorization and policy controls, and delivering low-latency, verifiable execution inside the product. Turnkey enables teams to build DeFi features that feel native, operate predictably at scale, and earn long-term user trust.
As DeFi continues to mature, the applications that succeed will be those built on infrastructure that treats wallets, signing, and authorization as first-class product primitives. Turnkey makes that possible by turning DeFi from external tooling into durable product infrastructure.
Get started with Turnkey for free and see how native DeFi products can drive user engagement and retention.
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