How Axiom supports a global DeFi trading platform with Turnkey

Learn how this YC-backed DeFi trading platform partnered with Turnkey to build user trust and support scale during its most crucial growth period.

• 1M+ user wallets created
• 100K+ users onboarded each month
• $100M+ in platform revenue within 100 days of implementation

“Solidifying user trust is one of the hardest things to do in our industry. Turnkey's strong reputation surrounding onchain security and key management helped us capture that trust from day one.” — Preston Ellis, Co-Founder and CTO at Axiom

About

Axiom is an industry-leading DeFi platform designed to be the only application you need to trade onchain. After an intensive YC accelerator period, Axiom launched its reimagined platform in early 2025, amassing over 1 million users and surpassing $100 million in revenue. 

Challenge

Establishing a robust security and compliance foundation

After leading Axiom’s team through an intensive YC accelerator program, Co-Founder and CTO, Preston Ellis, was preparing to launch the company's reimagined DeFi trading platform to the crypto masses. 

One of his top priorities, beyond revitalizing Axiom’s UI/UX, was solidifying the platform’s onchain security and its non-custodial status. Achieving these feats in-house would be no easy task.

With the platform's projected launch date quickly approaching, Preston's lean (yet agile) team felt they didn’t have the capacity to build secure key storage and signing flows from scratch – let alone build and maintain documentation to prove Axiom’s non-custodial status. And they weren’t willing to limit future product innovation to make it happen. 

Preston needed wallet infrastructure that could deliver on both of these fronts. His ideal solution would provide:

• Regulatory compliance safeguards–Non-custodial wallets reduce regulatory risks by ensuring the provider never controls user funds or keys, limiting liability and security vulnerabilities. 

• Flexible policy enforcement–ensuring his team could tailor rules and permissions dynamically without needing to rewrite core logic, offering considerable flexibility.

• Trustworthy name recognition–choosing a solution that could secure user trust with widely recognized credibility and a proven track record.

Following recommendations by trusted peers in the crypto startup scene, Preston partnered with Turnkey.

“People were just fed up with the status quo of trading platforms. We wanted to show we were willing to implement all the features that traders had been requesting for months, or even years. Turnkey helped us achieve that.” ‍

Solution

Turnkey’s secure, flexible, and non-custodial wallet infrastructure

Axiom leveraged Turnkey's wallet infrastructure to establish an airtight security and compliance foundation that supported the launch of its reimagined DeFi trading platform.

As Preston had hoped, Turnkey's flexible policy engine helped enforce tailored, automated, and auditable rulesets across the company. "Turnkey offered extremely fine-grained permissions that enabled us to automate onchain actions without compromising security," Preston explains. 

Plus, Turnkey's support for Programmable Key Management (PKM) meant Preston's team could define and enforce bespoke policies entirely through JSON code rather than writing rigid policy logic directly into the application layer.

With Turnkey, Preston and his team now have the capacity to focus entirely on growing the platform in both scale and functionality.

“Turnkey was recommended to us by several other fast-moving startups, who said they could assist with our security and regulatory compliance obligations, and they have done just that.”

Results

Exponential growth, ironclad security, and solidified user trust

Since partnering with Turnkey, Axiom has successfully scaled its platform while maintaining rigorous security and compliance standards essential to any DeFi solution. 

• 1M+ user wallets created
• 100K+ users onboarded each month
• $100M+ in platform revenue within 100 days of implementation

As his team looks to implement more unique workflows and wallet experiences moving forward, Preston views Turnkey's partnership as crucial to the sustainable growth of Axiom’s platform.

“Turnkey has shown its willingness to support the workflows we want to create. We’d absolutely recommend partnering with them.”