Partnering with Turnkey: Crypto Private Key Infrastructure

Throughout the ups and downs of crypto financial markets, one thing has remained the same: builders are still building. The number of active developers contributing to open-source projects continues to climb, and is now more than 300% of what it was in 2018. 

As the crypto developer stack takes shape, custody is, of course, a core pillar—but many custody products were originally designed to support buy-and-hold financial use cases, not the development of new products. While existing enterprise custody solutions are helping larger organizations scale, developers have their own unique set of circumstances, and in their search for self-serve solutions, too often encounter long sales cycles, large annual minimums, and delays in support for new chains and tokens. Many developers simply give up on the API dream and settle for integrating existing solutions that don’t fully meet their needs.

Sam McInvgale, Bryce Ferguson and Jack Kearney met while building Coinbase’s innovative Custody product, and have seen these challenges firsthand. They were determined to give developers the custody infrastructure necessary to make building in crypto easier. The result is Turnkey, a private key management platform offering the same advanced security protections major financial institutions demand, but designed just for developers. Sam, Bryce, Jack and their team have built an accessible, easy to use, API-first product that helps users self-custody their crypto via secure enclaves, a deterministic operating system and a custom language for managing permissions. Developers can go from sign-up to signing a transaction in minutes, not months—and generate thousands of wallets programmatically across chains.

We first met the Turnkey team through Bryce, a Sequoia Scout whose passion for all things crypto we knew well. When he introduced us to Sam and Jack, we quickly realized this was a company with three co-founders who would each be backable on their own.  They now are leading an expert team with years of experience securing billions of dollars of crypto across Coinbase, BitGo and Polychain. We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with them and lead Turnkey’s seed round.

Now, they are expanding that team and launching a closed beta of their platform, and we encourage anyone building in crypto to give it a try. Today’s launch is an exciting step toward the future of the crypto developer stack, and we can’t wait to see how Turnkey empowers the next generation of builders.