A deeper look into Turnkey's web3 development tooling

From agentic trading solutions to stablecoin payment flows, today’s web3 user expects developers to ship experiences that mirror the simplicity and intuitiveness of most modern fintech apps. But, while meeting users’ expectations is important, the infrastructure underpinning many onchain experiences is still stuck in the late 2010s. 

That’s where Turnkey comes in. 

In this guide, we’ll take a deeper look into how Turnkey’s developer tooling enables teams to deliver secure and scalable wallet experiences that drive adoption from both new entrants and crypto veterans alike.

Meet Turnkey: Wallet infrastructure you won’t outgrow

Turnkey is the developer-facing infrastructure layer for secure, non-custodial wallet creation, signing, and automation. It is fully programmable, modular, and API-first, designed to work with your existing architecture, not against it.

Unlike many infrastructure solutions that prescribe UX patterns or enforce chain-specific logic, Turnkey provides flexible low-level primitives that enable developers to create experiences that always feel native to their products.

Whether you’re building automated trading flows, gamified onchain experiences, or embedded wallets for consumer apps, Turnkey delivers the tools needed to align your product with the evolving standards of today’s crypto users.

How Turnkey’s web3 development tooling helps developers build custom wallet logic

Turnkey's developer tooling can be broken down into several core utilities that form the foundation for building secure,  scalable onchain experiences. Let's take a deeper look at each utility:

Application architectures built from primitives

At its core, Turnkey is structured around a set of primitives that enable developers to model even the most complex application architectures. These primitives include organizations, sub-organizations, users, resources, authenticators, and activities. 

Developers can assign scoped authenticators to specific sub-orgs or users, apply policies at any level, and configure root quorum requirements for high-impact operations. 

This flexible permissions model adapts to the needs of your product while ensuring your governance structure can evolve over time without re-architecting the wallet layer.

Wallets-as-a-Service

Developers can create non-custodial wallets programmatically through Turnkey’s API or via language-specific SDKs,  including JavaScript/TypeScript for web, Swift for iOS, and Flutter for cross-platform mobile. 

This approach ensures wallet generation, signing, and policy enforcement can be integrated directly into any application’s backend or client, without introducing third-party handoffs.

Unlike many wallet infrastructure solutions, Turnkey supports streamlined onboarding and authentication flows via passkeys, email, SMS, and OAuth. 

This is a considerable advantage for developers looking to attract new entrants into the crypto space, as they can bypass the complexities of browser extensions and private key management.

To further accelerate integration, Turnkey’s Embedded Wallet Kit provides pre-built, customizable UI components. These components can easily be tailored to match any application's existing style preference, enabling developers to own the user experience from onboarding to transaction execution.

Multi-chain support

Turnkey offers out-of-the-box support for all major blockchains (including Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and TRON) as well as chain-agnostic signing capabilities. This means developers can build products that operate seamlessly across multiple networks without maintaining separate signing logic, infrastructure, or key management. 

Whether you’re looking to implement multi-chain vaults or NFT minting flows, Turnkey streamlines cross-chain communication by default. 

Policies

Turnkey's policy engine enables developers to define and enforce what actions a wallet can take at any time. For instance, developers can set transaction limits, restrict certain transfers, require multi-party approvals, scope actions by role, or introduce additional checks for sensitive operations — all enforced directly at the key level. 

Developers can also use policies to fine-tune account abstraction features like gas sponsorship or to grant delegated access with tightly controlled permissions. With granular control built into the signing layer, developers can scale securely without layering on additional complexity.

Onchain automation

Turnkey enables developers to build custom, programmatic signing workflows, ideal for AI agents, backend services, or recurring transactions. These automated flows reduce manual overhead and ensure transactions are executed consistently and securely according to predefined rules.

To ensure auditability, every automated action executed via Turnkey is logged alongside the policies and authenticators that authorized it. This provides developers with the visibility required to ensure automated actions align with user intent, while eliminating regulatory oversight. 

The result is automation that accelerates user experiences while meeting compliance and security requirements by design.

Session-based access

With Turnkey, developers can also enable time-bound sessions where users can execute multiple transactions without having to sign each time. By removing the need for repetitive re-approvals, retail traders experience far less signing fatigue, while AI agents also benefit from increased autonomy. 

This utility is especially impactful with crypto newcomers who expect transaction execution (among other onchain actions) to match the seamlessness of the typical fintech app.

Security

Every private key Turnkey generates is stored and used exclusively inside AWS Nitro Enclaves — a form of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) — ensuring they’re never exposed to Turnkey, your application, or any third party. 

All signing actions are logged with complete audit trails, and the infrastructure supports remote attestation so you can independently verify the integrity of the code running inside the enclave. By keeping sensitive operations within verifiable TEEs, Turnkey reduces the attack surface while delivering performant signing flows at scale.

What developers can build with Turnkey

With access to flexible key management primitives via Turnkey, the challenge for developers shifts from "how can we build this" to "what can we build next?" If you're looking for inspiration, here are several examples of what organizations are creating using Turnkey today:

Developer smart accounts

Turnkey enables the creation of smart accounts that allow developers to access wallet creation and signing capabilities, without handling keys themselves.

This function proved vital for leading web3 development platform Alchemy, whose Embedded Accounts product leans on Turnkey to spin up EOA or ERC-4337 smart accounts on behalf of new users, integrating invisible wallet creation directly into the onboarding flow. 

Behind the scenes, session keys, gas sponsorships, and batched transactions are handled by Turnkey’s policy engine and TEE-based security framework, delivering performant and safe workflows at scale. 

This same foundation also powers large-scale activations, such as enabling NFT claims at ETHDenver with a biometric login, while wallets are generated and deployed silently in the background.

Seamless onboarding and recovery flows

Rather than requiring users to download external wallets or manage seed phrases, Turnkey offers seamless onboarding via passkeys, social login, or biometrics, as well as email-based recovery flows. This emphasis on ease of use was what led Dynamic (a fast-growing wallet SDK) to partner with Turnkey. 

Through Turnkey, Dynamic delivers a mobile-first experience where, after authenticating via email or social login, users register a passkey that becomes the sole credential for wallet creation and transaction signing. 

Private keys are encrypted at rest and only decrypted inside secure enclaves after biometric approval, ensuring that wallets remain invisible and safe. If a user loses their login credentials, they can regain access via email alone,  no seed phrases or manual support required.

‍AI agents and secure automation

AI agents are emerging as a powerful way to simplify complex onchain interactions. By combining natural language processing with secure wallet infrastructure, developers can build products where users simply state their intent, such as “claim my staking rewards”, and have those actions executed automatically.

Pass App uses Turnkey to deliver this capability, underpinning an AI-driven wallet experience that empowers agents to interpret user intent and securely perform the corresponding actions.

Turnkey's policy engine enforces what actions AI agents can take and contains all signing flows within secure enclaves. The result is a system where AI agents can rebalance portfolios, claim rewards, or execute trades seamlessly and safely,  delivering the convenience of automation with the safeguards of enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure.

Scalable infrastructure for DeFi trading apps

Some infrastructure solutions falter under high-volume trading flows, but Turnkey delivers both secure and performant DeFi experiences at scale.

For instance, Moonshot, the most-downloaded crypto trading app in the US, used Turnkey to provision over 1.5M self-custodial wallets, each of which benefits from sub-100ms latency on transactions. 

Turnkey’s API-first design also empowered Moonshot to implement a fully-branded onboarding experience that rivaled web2 in simplicity,  all without adding headcount or delaying time to market.

Stablecoin payment solutions

Turnkey supports stablecoin payment flows that match the simplicity of traditional fintech experiences while maintaining security and compliance.

For example, Mural Pay (a prominent stablecoin payments platform) uses Turnkey to process over 5,000 monthly cross-border stablecoin payments for fintechs, banks, and global businesses. Transactions are signed within TEEs at 50 –100ms latency, ensuring near-instant settlement with verifiable security. 

With Turnkey, Mural Pay eliminated the need for in-house key management, reduced infrastructure costs by $3K per month, and gained the flexibility to offer both custodial and non-custodial models through the same integration, supporting diverse customer needs in the stablecoin payments space.

Powering the future of programmable wallet infrastructure

In an ecosystem where most infrastructure solutions rely on rigid, pre-defined primitives, Turnkey empowers developers to ship secure and scalable experiences that align with evolving user expectations.

With flexible primitives, Wallets-as-a-Service, multi-chain support, policy-based controls, onchain automation, session-based access, and enclave-backed security, Turnkey delivers the full developer toolkit for building modern wallet experiences. These tools work together so teams can focus on product innovation instead of re-architecting infrastructure.

Are you ready to bring your next crypto project to market?

Get started with Turnkey today and build with developer tooling you won’t outgrow.