How Genius supports a privacy-first, professional-grade trading terminal with Turnkey

Learn how this YZi Labs-backed trading terminal partnered with Turnkey to power sophisticated, multi-wallet execution, streamline new user onboarding, and safeguard developer bandwidth.

• 3M+ user wallets created in 3 days
• 200K+ active users supported by Turnkey
• 6 months of development time saved

“Turnkey turned wallet management from a constant concern into a solved problem for our team. Since the partnership began, we’ve scaled to millions of users while pushing the limits of onchain trading without any bottlenecks.” — Samuel Videau, CTO at Genius

About

Genius is a professional-grade trading terminal designed to be the definitive, private interface for onchain execution. Backed by strategic investment from YZi Labs, the platform addresses the core “transparency bug” for professional traders through its proprietary Ghost Order protocol, which uses ephemeral wallets to move large positions without alerting the broader market.

Challenge

Unstable in-house wallet infrastructure threatened user retention and slowed development velocity

Bridging the gap between centralized and decentralized exchanges is the core mission at Genius. Its platform was created to replicate the pricing quality and execution standards of a CEX, while providing the flexibility that defines modern DEXs. 

Naturally, delivering that experience to millions of global traders requires robust, flexible, and scalable wallet infrastructure.

To support the terminal’s beta launch, Genius’ engineering team initially built their wallet infrastructure in-house, using Lit Protocol’s Programmable Key Pairs (PKPs). But as trading volume and user acquisition increased, that setup created bottlenecks that started to slow the platform down.

Because Lit’s early-stage, decentralized signing network required complex multi-node coordination, Genius experienced unexpected failures during critical operations like login and order execution. “Unpredictable failure rates directly threatened our ability to retain active traders,” explains Mehbub Hussain, Founding Engineer at Genius. “It didn’t take long for us to realize that migrating to a consistent architecture was an absolute priority.”

Beyond stabilizing the user experience, Genius’ strategic roadmap required an advanced framework that could support programmatic limit orders and the platform's proprietary Ghost Order protocol, all while maintaining a strictly non-custodial model.

To navigate these requirements without delaying the platform's public rollout, Samuel Videau, CTO at Genius, initiated a competitive analysis of leading third-party wallet infrastructure solutions. This strategic assessment led him directly to Turnkey, whose seamless user experience, low-level primitives, and enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure were the ideal fit.

“We knew it would have been very difficult for us to retain users because of the failure rate and the unpredictability of the failures. Turnkey offered a level of reliability we didn’t find in other providers.” — Samuel Videau, CTO at Genius

Solution

Delivering predictable and scalable onchain execution with Turnkey

Getting started with Turnkey was a simple and streamlined process. The Genius team worked directly with Turnkey to ensure the migration from Lit was successful, leveraging in-depth documentation and real-world examples at every step. 

“We were really impressed with how Turnkey handled the onboarding process,” Samuel shares. “Once we were live, we ran several stress tests, one being our TGE, and it responded very well.”

Today, Turnkey powers all onchain actions on the Genius trading terminal, from frictionless onboarding pipelines to core key management workflows. Account creation is initiated entirely through a biometric passkey or social login. Behind the scenes, Turnkey programmatically provisions a non-custodial wallet for the user.

Every private key is generated, encrypted, and stored within Turnkey's Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), isolated compute environments that support cryptographic attestation to verify that only authorized code is running.

To deliver advanced trading features without introducing custody risks, Genius leverages Turnkey's policy engine to govern backend automation. 

For example, with automated limit and target orders, users grant Genius scoped permissions. When a specific price target is reached, the Genius backend service triggers the execution even if the trader is offline. Turnkey's policies harden this specific workflow by preventing the backend script from executing any arbitrary or unauthorized transactions outside of those narrow, user-defined parameters.

For the platform's Ghost Order protocol, Genius uses Turnkey's high-throughput architecture to generate thousands of wallets instantly with a single click. Now, traders can programmatically distribute transaction volume across separate, ephemeral addresses, moving significant positions without compromising alpha.

The impact extends to Genius’ development team. Rather than spending hours responding to breakages in user flows, they now allocate their time to platform expansion and business logic. For a growing team operating in an increasingly saturated market, that flexibility continues to prove vital.

“Turnkey's policy engine enables us to handle automated trading strategies safely without ever exposing private keys. That flexibility has been a major unlock for limit and target orders.” — Samuel Videau, CTO at Genius

Results

Genius scales to millions of users with zero execution bottlenecks

By outsourcing its core wallet infrastructure to Turnkey, Genius successfully executed a high-volume public launch alongside its early funding announcement. Despite rapid spikes in concurrent user activity, Turnkey’s infrastructure maintained deterministic signing latencies and uniform uptime across all active regions.

• 3M+ user wallets created in 3 days
• 200K+ active users supported by Turnkey
• 6 months of development time saved

Looking ahead, the Genius team plans to leverage Turnkey’s primitives to further expand its product roadmap, integrating deeper policy enhancements for automated trading strategies.

“Turnkey gives us enterprise-level wallet reliability with the flexibility we need to experiment fast. Now, we focus our development resources on creating new features, not wallet infrastructure.” — Mehbub Hussain, Founding Engineer at Genius

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