How Frontrun powers extension wallets for thousands of professional traders with Turnkey

Learn how this next-gen trading OS partnered with Turnkey to solidify user trust and adoption through secure, embedded wallets.

• 35K+ user wallets created
• 2 weeks of development time saved
• <1 week to full integration

“Security is the foundation of everything. Without it, you don’t have a platform any professional trader will use. Turnkey’s reputation for onchain security made the decision to partner with them easy.” — Chris Li, Founder and CEO of Frontrun

About

Frontrun is a next-gen trading OS built to equip crypto power users with effortless trading flows and insights from the largest wallet intelligence database on Solana. Backed by leading strategic investors, including Alliance and YZi Labs, Frontrun continues to redefine onchain alpha.

Challenge

Bringing an advanced trading OS to market required powerful wallet infrastructure

After helping establish the product infrastructure and ecosystem pillar for the Sui Network, Chris Li began conceptualizing Frontrun, a next-gen extension wallet and trading OS for crypto power users. Once launched, Frontrun would enable its users to spot insiders, track market movers, and execute fast trades with lower fees, acting as an essential co-pilot for onchain alpha.

The problem? As a stealth startup with a lean 6-person team, Frontrun didn’t have the internal resources needed to build such an advanced product from scratch quickly. Even with the team’s deep engineering experience, the initial time investment and ongoing overhead of building and managing crypto infrastructure at scale were non-starters.

To enable advanced, server-side actions (such as limit orders), Frontrun would also need full custody access to move user funds, introducing looming compliance and security hurdles.

Chris knew that for Frontrun to succeed, he needed an external wallet infrastructure partner to help him preserve his team’s bandwidth, solidify user trust, and abstract away any security or compliance complexity on day one. After evaluating several providers who lacked the low-level flexibility and robust Chrome extension support Frontrun needed, Chris was recommended to Turnkey by trusted colleagues in his network. The provider’s robust policy engine and comprehensive support for extension wallets solidified his conviction to move forward.

“We needed a way to ensure user flows were both secure and intuitive, especially for a new offering in an already saturated space. Turnkey helped us deliver on both those requirements.”

Solution

Delivering secure, user-friendly, and compliant DeFi experiences with Turnkey

Frontrun integrated Turnkey's wallet infrastructure, enabling secure, frictionless authentication flows, key management, and server-side trading while preserving internal bandwidth at every step.

Thanks to Turnkey’s flexible SDKs and comprehensive documentation, Frontrun was able to move from initial exploration to a functional implementation in just a few days.

“Getting started with Turnkey was super easy and didn’t consume much of the team’s time,” Chris shares. “The interface is easy to navigate, the documentation is sound, and their team is always available if you have questions that need answering.”

Today, Turnkey powers every user interaction from onboarding to transaction execution. When a new user creates an account through email or social login, Turnkey automatically provisions a non-custodial wallet, no seed phrase required. On the backend, Turnkey stores each generated key in secure enclaves, highly constrained compute environments that protect against extraction even if Frontrun’s servers are compromised.

Through Turnkey’s flexible policy engine, Frontrun executes server-side limit orders without compromising security, performance, or compliance. Users place orders on the Frontrun platform, and Turnkey grants servers temporary, scoped permissions to execute the transaction within its secure enclaves. Because each order is user-initiated with ephemeral permissions and no key exposure, Frontrun assumes zero custody risk for offering this benefit to traders.

“We use policies to restrict permissions to only what is necessary to complete the trade,” Chris shares. “It’s fundamental to ensuring Frontrun isn’t considered a custodian.”

For Frontrun, a fast-moving startup with a lean development team, Turnkey proved to be the ideal wallet infrastructure partner.

"Turnkey provides a very flexible policy engine that allows us to execute limit orders on the server without knowing the user's private key. This was a major unlock in helping us ensure a convenient user experience without compromising compliance."

Results

Immediate user adoption, effortless key management, and infrastructure built for scale

By abstracting the engineering, security, and compliance overhead of launching a new platform, Turnkey enabled Frontrun to execute a quick and successful launch. Under Chris’ guidance, the trading OS continues to gain strong adoption and drive meaningful trading volume.

• 35K+ user wallets created
• 2 weeks of development time saved
• <1 week to full integration

Looking ahead, Chris is confident that Turnkey will remain a crucial partner in Frontrun’s success, streamlining every user interaction from wallet creation to transaction execution.

"We’ve onboarded tens of thousands of new users since launch, and that’s all because of the trust that traders have in Turnkey. Their wallet infrastructure gave us instant credibility."