Announcing a new standard for Smart Contract Management with Turnkey

Smart Contract Management with Turnkey empowers teams to manage contracts with programmable, role-based security, all enforced at signing. 

Smart contracts power critical onchain operations, from minting and burning stablecoins to managing real-world assets like stocks, funds, or real estate. As these systems grow, teams face a hard problem: how to scale these operations safely without slowing down execution or expanding security risk.

Today, most teams rely on a mix of contract-level permissions, multisig wallets, and traditional key management solutions. This approach introduces several challenges:

• Unrestricted keys: Traditional key management grants broad signing authority, allowing any authorized key to invoke all contract functions without role-level constraints.
  
  
• Operational bottlenecks: Manual multisig approvals and human review slow down time-sensitive operations like minting, burning, or emergency pauses.
  
  
• Rigid permissions: To improve safety, granular access controls are often hard-coded directly into smart contracts. While secure, these permissions are static, meaning policy changes require contract upgrades or redeployments.
  
  
• Scaling friction: As transaction volume grows, teams are forced to choose between speed and security.

As onchain systems mature, organizations need a better way to govern who can perform which smart contract actions, under what conditions, and at what scale.

Turnkey’s solution: Smart Contract Management at the signature level

Smart Contract Management by Turnkey combines programmable access controls, low-latency signing, and developer-native tooling into a single, production-ready platform.

Programmable role-based access controls (RBAC): Turnkey allows teams to govern critical smart contract functions with fine-grained, programmable policies enforced at signing Instead of relying on all-or-nothing keys or static onchain roles, teams can define exactly which actions are permitted and under what conditions.

Low-latency signing with enclave security: All transactions are signed inside secure enclaves, ensuring private keys never leave the trusted execution environment. This architecture delivers strong isolation and fast execution, enabling teams to submit and sign transactions in 50–100 milliseconds without introducing additional security risk. By enforcing policy checks directly in the signing path, Turnkey eliminates manual review while preserving strict guarantees for critical operations.

Developer-native workflows: Turnkey integrates directly into existing development pipelines through native Foundry support, allowing engineers to test signing logic locally using the same policies enforced in production. SDKs provide first-class support for transaction construction, signing, and parsing, with custom policies based on transaction parameters such as, function selectors, recipients, and value limits.

Broad, production-ready chain support: Turnkey is chain-agnostic, supporting a wide range of blockchains to meet real-world production needs. Full support is available for EVM and SVM environments, including transaction parsing and custom policy enforcement. Turnkey supports BTC, TRON, ATOM, SUI, APT, TON, XRP, SEI, and any chain built on secp256k1 or ed25519. 

This enables teams to apply consistent security and access controls as their onchain footprint expands.
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Smart contract policy workflows and advantages

Instead of trusting individual keys or slowing operations with manual approvals, Turnkey evaluates every signing request against explicit policies before approving a transaction.

This approach decouples security controls from smart contract code, allowing teams to move fast without sacrificing safety. This programmable infrastructure gives developers an advantage over traditional management practices, allowing them to:

Set least privilege access

Define exactly which onchain actions are permitted and under what conditions using role-based access controls (RBAC). Policies are enforced at every smart contract signing request, ensuring keys can only do what they are explicitly allowed to do.

• Restrict an API key to only call mint() on a specific contract
  
  
• Prevent the same key from calling burn(), pause(), or ownership transfer functions
  
  
• Require specific users or tags to approve high-risk operations
  
  

Scale operations without manual approvals

Programmatically submit and sign transactions in 50–100 milliseconds, eliminating human bottlenecks for routine operations while maintaining strong guardrails for sensitive actions.

• Automate minting and redemption flows
  
  
• Support higher transaction throughput
  
  
• Respond instantly to operational events
  
  

Control permissions by risk

Not all smart contract actions require the same level of oversight. Turnkey lets teams apply different security models depending on the sensitivity of the operation.

• Single-signer automated minting within predefined limits
  
  
• Multi-sign approvals for upgrades, policy changes, or treasury operations
  
  
• Time-bound delegated access for emergency functions like pause()
  
  

Ship faster without redeployments

Update permissions and approval logic directly in Turnkey’s Policy Engine, without redeploying smart contracts or changing application logic. Teams can iterate on security policies as requirements evolve.

Foundry support allows engineers to:

• Integrate Turnkey directly into existing scripts and tests
  
  
• Use the same signing policies locally and in production
  
  
• Reduce friction between development and deployment

Turnkey: Policy and workflows that make for smarter contract management

Turnkey makes it easy to move from ad hoc key management to secure, scalable smart contract operations. Whether you are automating mint and burn flows, tightening controls around admin functions, or preparing for production-scale throughput, Turnkey provides the infrastructure to enforce least-privilege access without slowing execution.

With support for Foundry, first-class SDKs, and broad chain coverage, teams can quickly adopt Turnkey for critical onchain operations while maintaining the security guarantees required in production.

Learn more in the Smart Contract Management cookbook.