Investing in Turnkey
Lisa Cuesta and I are proud to announce our angel investment into Turnkey’s seed round led by Sequoia, with participation from Variant and Coinbase.
How many transactions per second do you think will occur in the crypto ecosystem once we reach broad adoption? For reference, Visa does a max of 24,000 tps. Google has 100k searches per second.
I love asking people this question because it reveals how they think about crypto — the use cases, the user behavior, and the impact crypto will have on the world. Most answers come in the 100k-1m range.
My answer is 1 billion tps. It sounds like a lot at first glance, but not once you break it down. Humans sending transactions will be a pittance of the total — most activity will originate via machines. Hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial instruments, hundreds of billions of IoT devices, millions of smart contracts, and other components will account for the vast majority of activity.
Under that assumption, key management remains an unsolved problem because today’s key management solutions cater to humans, not machines. They optimize for secure, long-term storage and leverage organizational friction as an additional security mechanism.
Turnkey is solving this problem and will catalyze the next wave of crypto developer adoption.
Turnkey is secure private key infrastructure purpose-built for crypto developers. It enables developers to use simple APIs to dynamically generate thousands of wallets and sign tens of thousands of transactions across any chain, with flexible, programmable permissions to ensure they only sign what they want.
Additionally, Turnkey was built on a minimal, immutable, and deterministic operating system, designed for environments requiring paranoia and accountability. This puts users in control of their keys while providing institutional-grade security.
Tactically, a good way of thinking about Turnkey is in the context of cloud computing. In the same way cloud enables developers to access primitives like storage, compute, and networking, Turnkey adds a new and equally important primitive to the developer toolkit — keys.
There are use cases today for solo devs, traders, defi prime brokers, institutions, IoT like Helium and Dimo, and game developers, but as with cloud, what excites me most is unleashing developer creativity with this new primitive.
The team is monstrously good and no one is a better fit to build this product. The three co-founders met at Coinbase while building the world’s largest and most trusted crypto custodian, and reunited to create Turnkey. Sam led product for Coinbase Custody and built it from $0 to $100m ARR. Bryce was the first PM on Coinbase Custody and went on to lead crypto at TradeRepublic, one of the largest fintechs in Europe. Jack was CTO at Polychain, one of the largest and most reputable funds in crypto.
I’m incredibly excited to support Sam, Bryce, Jack, and the rest of the Turnkey team as they bring this important product to developers. Soon, Turnkey will be open to anyone, but until then, they’re granting access to a limited number of technical teams. Join their waitlist to get early access and stay up-to-date as Turnkey comes to market.
