How KYD Labs + Turnkey power top venues and artists onchain

Learn how this a16z-backed ticketing and marketing platform is bringing the world’s biggest stars and music venues onchain with Turnkey.

• 100K+ wallets created
• $2M+ in deposits for creator-based financing
• 3 weeks to full integration

“If your team's goal is to integrate blockchain technology with real-world use cases across large-scale products, look no further than Turnkey.” — Ahmed Nimale, Co-Founder and CEO at KYD Labs

About

KYD Labs, pronounced (KID), is transforming live music ticketing and marketing by putting user data and liquidity back in the hands of artists.

Backed by a16z and founded by music industry veterans from Ticketmaster and Live Nation, KYD Labs delivers web3 solutions that eliminate ticketing fees while empowering artists and venues with accessible DeFi funding and targeted marketing opportunities.

Challenge

Disrupting legacy ticketing solutions with seamless blockchain-powered experiences

After spending years building ticketing solutions for some of the world's most prominent artists (including Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, and Drake) at Ticketmaster and Live Nation, Ahmed Nimale saw the opportunity to pioneer a new operating system for live music using blockchain technology. 

He founded KYD Labs to deliver on this vision, but quickly found that abstracting the complexities of crypto for end users was no easy task.

KYD Labs is an innovative solution, even by web3 standards. Its founding mission is to enable venues and artists to leverage their own data to reach fans across every major social channel, and access the necessary capital to avoid predatory financing deals that plague the music industry.

Serving an end-user base that includes venues, major artists, agents and fans alike, most with little to no crypto experience, made it essential to deliver a solution that matched or exceeded web2 in usability.

To achieve this goal, KYD Labs had to build bespoke wallet solutions to support phone number authentication and seamless 2FA-based login. Web2 users didn't want to download a wallet to buy a ticket, especially if they were competing in a queue.

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The problem? As KYD Labs scaled, they needed a wallet solution that could help them evolve with their customer’s needs and create new DeFi lending models that required security, compliance and multichain support. 

While their current flows drove adoption from non-crypto-savvy users, the WaaS provider KYD used at the time relied on rigid primitives that limited KYD Labs’ ability to customize the experience. 

During his search for a new WaaS provider that could match KYD Labs' customization and scale requirements, trusted friends introduced Ahmed to Turnkey. Beyond just meeting KYD’s technical requirements, the platform offered the perfect balance of flexibility and security. With multi-chain support, low-latency signing, and infrastructure designed to scale, Turnkey gave KYD the confidence that they could deliver a best-in-class experience for their users without compromising on control or security.

Following a brief demo and consultation with the team, they moved forward with the partnership.

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“Over 99% of KYD Labs' users are regular people who have little to no crypto experience. With Turnkey, we have the ability to craft our own unique solutions to scale, bypassing the complexities of crypto and enabling lenders to gain yield while helping these venues and artists grow.”

Solution

Turnkey’s bespoke and scalable wallet infrastructure

In just three weeks, KYD Labs was live with Turnkey's wallet infrastructure, delivering seamless onchain experiences to fans and artists at scale.

The partnership started while KYD was completing a migration from a Move-based blockchain to Solana, a process during which Turnkey ensured that all existing 100K+ wallets with tickets within KYD Labs' ecosystem remained intact. 

"Migrating to an entirely new chain based on a completely different language is a complex process," Ahmed shares. "Turnkey made sure we had the guidance needed to make it successful." 

With Turnkey, Ahmed not only retained KYD Labs' user-friendly onboarding and ticketing flows, he also introduced other familiar authentication methods, including phone number and passkeys. These web2-based onboarding avenues, combined with an entirely custom UX, have resulted in soaring adoption rates from fans and artists alike.

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Going from custodial to a non-custodial solution also opened the door for artists and venues to get accessible debt financing, and for DeFi lenders to earn yield on Solana from fees generated by tickets and the success of their shows. This model helps artists bypass predatory financing deals with industry insiders, keeping ticket prices low and fan information out of corporate hands.

But what solidified Ahmed's confidence in the partnership was Turnkey's proven reliability under massive ticket sale spikes. The recent Adela Provocatour Tour is a great example of this, with fans creating Turnkey-powered accounts to buy tickets instantly, selling out the show in minutes. 

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By removing technical friction, Turnkey enabled KYD Labs to introduce fans to crypto-powered experiences without forcing them to confront blockchain complexity.

“Their infrastructure is scalable, customizable, and built for real-world use cases. These are the requirements for any solution trying to process sales for high volume merchants and deliver tickets to fans unfamiliar with crypto.”

Results

Real-world versatility, increased adoption, and a seamless user experience

Partnering with Turnkey empowered KYD Labs to disrupt legacy ticketing solutions, delivering streamlined and innovative blockchain experiences to hundreds of thousands of fans and artists. 

The results since the partnership began?

• 100K+ wallets created
• $2M+ in deposits for creator-based financing
• 3 weeks to full integration

Looking ahead, Ahmed plans to build on Turnkey’s chain-agnostic foundation by launching new fan engagement tools, expanding multi-chain experiences, and introducing advanced, non-custodial ticketing features.

“While some solutions talk about how they support the creator economy, Turnkey is actively powering the new live music ecosystem at scale in the world’s biggest music market, NYC — with real users, real events, and serious business impact.”

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