Getting started with Turnkey

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About

Turnkey is highly flexible key management infrastructure, purpose-built for security and scale. Our API and open-source SDKs make it easy for you to take your product from 0 to 1, and enable developers to create millions of embedded wallets and automate complex onchain transactions.

Whether you’re building a DeFi platform, a payments app, an AI agent, or anything requiring a private key, Turnkey offers the building blocks to bring your ideas to life.

Our solution covers two main use cases:

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Concepts Overview

At the core of Turnkey is an important concept: instead of directly managing private keys, wallets are accessed through authenticators like passkeys, social logins, or API keys:

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Here’s how that works:

• Organizations (parent orgs) in Turnkey are top-level entities that contain users, wallets, and policies for a business, with the initial “parent organization” typically representing an entire Turnkey-powered application.
• Parent organizations can create sub-organizations (sub-orgs), which are fully segregated organizations nested under the parent organization. Parent orgs cannot modify the contents of a sub-org, and sub-orgs and typically represent an end user.
• Both parent organizations and sub-organizations contain a set of resources and authenticators that you can configure, including their own users, wallets, API keys, private keys, and policies.
• Activities (like signing transactions or creating users) are governed by policies created via Turnkey’s policy engine, though root users can bypass the policy engine when meeting root quorum requirements.
• Wallets in Turnkey are HD seed phrases that can generate multiple wallet accounts (addresses) for signing operations.

For a more in-depth overview, access our documentation here.

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Demos And Examples

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Feature spotlight: Send crypto via a URL

Moonshot users can now send crypto to their friends via a URL. Under the hood, Turnkey pre-generates a wallet for the new user and loads it with the specified amount of crypto — all authenticated via a biometric passkey (e.g. Face ID).

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SDKs

Turnkey provides a variety of client libraries for interacting with Turnkey’s API and performing common workflows, as well as several wrappers for popular web3 libraries for easy integration into existing dApps.

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Security

We take security seriously at Turnkey and have built our architecture to ensure that you and your end users’ private keys are safe. Our whitepaper covers our holistic security model in-depth and our vision for building verifiable key management infrastructure.

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Support

For support, product feedback, and input, join our community Slack channel here.