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You can export any wallet in your organization from the Company Wallets page of the Turnkey dashboard. Exporting reveals the wallet’s seed phrase, the BIP-39 mnemonic that every account in the wallet derives from. With it you can recreate every address in the wallet, including accounts you add later, in any other wallet software. This page covers wallets in your parent organization, which is the organization you sign in to. To export a wallet that belongs to a sub-organization, use the export activity from your application or a script. You might want to export a wallet if:
  • You want an offline backup of the wallet’s key material that does not depend on Turnkey.
  • You are moving funds or operations to another wallet provider.
  • You are decommissioning the wallet and want to keep access to any funds that arrive later.
Before you start, keep the following in mind:
  • Turnkey never sees the seed phrase. A Turnkey enclave encrypts it to a key that exists only in your browser, and your browser decrypts and displays it. See how export works for the details.
  • The wallet stays in Turnkey after the export and keeps signing as before. Its Exported column changes to Yes and stays that way. There is no way to mark a wallet as not exported again, so an export is a permanent record that the seed phrase has left Turnkey.
  • Standalone private keys have their own Export button on the Private Keys tab. The steps are the same, and the dialog reveals the private key instead of a seed phrase.
  • Exporting a single account’s private key, rather than the whole seed phrase, is only available through the export wallet account activity.
Anyone who has the seed phrase controls every account in the wallet, and Turnkey’s policies and approvals no longer apply to them. Make sure nobody can see your screen, write the seed phrase down rather than copying it, and store it somewhere only the right people can reach.
Exporting a wallet requires approval from one of your authenticators, so keep your passkey or security key handy.
1

Open the Wallets page

In the left navigation, select Company Wallets, then select the wallet you want to export.
Open the Wallets page
2

Open the export dialog

On the wallet’s page, select Export.
Open the export dialog
3

Review the warnings

Read the warnings. Make sure nobody can see your screen, and plan to write the seed phrase down rather than copy it. Select Continue.If the dialog is titled Consensus Required for Export instead, your organization’s root quorum needs more than one approval. Follow Export when your organization requires consensus below.
Review the warnings
4

Approve the export

Confirm with your authenticator. Choose This Device to use a passkey, as shown in the screenshot, or another authenticator option from the modal, such as a security key.
Approve the export
5

Save the seed phrase

The dialog is replaced by a Seed Phrase panel that shows the words in order. Write them down, check them against the screen, and select Done when you are finished. The seed phrase is not shown again. If you lose it, run the export again to reveal it.Back on the wallet list, the wallet’s Exported column now reads Yes.

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Export when your organization requires consensus

If your root quorum has a threshold above 1, the export cannot finish in the browser the way it does for a single approver. The export activity waits for the other approvals, and the encrypted bundle only exists once they arrive. The dashboard therefore asks you to supply the encryption key up front from Turnkey’s hosted export page, and you bring the bundle back to that same page once the activity completes.
1

Copy the embedded key

Open export.turnkey.com in a new tab of the same browser. Under Export Key Material, copy the value labelled Embedded key. This is the public half of a key pair that the page generated and stored in this browser’s local storage.Do not paste a public key you generated yourself with a script. The export page can only reveal the seed phrase if the bundle was encrypted to the key it holds.
2

Paste the embedded key

Back in the dashboard, select Export on the wallet’s page as before. Because your root quorum needs more than one approval, the dialog is titled Consensus Required for Export and asks for a public key. Paste the embedded key and select Continue export, then approve with your authenticator.
Paste the embedded key
3

Export activity sent

The export is now a pending activity. Nothing is revealed until the other root quorum members approve it.
Export activity sent
4

Wait for the approvals

In the left navigation, select Activity Log. The export sits on the Pending tab until enough root quorum members approve it. They approve it from this same tab in their own dashboard, or with the approve activity endpoint. Approvals do not depend on the embedded key, so they can come from any browser or device.
Wait for the approvals
5

Copy the export bundle

Once approved, the activity moves to the History tab. Open it, expand result, then exportWalletResult, and copy the exportBundle value.
Copy the export bundle
6

Reveal the seed phrase

Return to the export.turnkey.com tab from step 1. Under Inject Wallet Export Bundle, paste the bundle into Bundle and your organization ID into Organization Id, then select Inject Bundle. The page decrypts the bundle and shows the seed phrase.
The private key that decrypts the bundle lives only in the export page’s local storage in the browser where you copied the embedded key. Do not clear that site’s data, use a private window, switch browsers, or select Reset Key between submitting the export and injecting the bundle. If the key is gone, the bundle cannot be decrypted. Start the export again from the dashboard.
If you would rather not rely on a browser tab staying intact while approvals come in, run the export from a script instead: generate your own P-256 key pair, submit the export wallet activity with its public key, and decrypt the bundle locally once the activity completes. The export-in-node example handles the wait for approvals.

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Restricting who can export

Export is an activity like any other, so policies decide which users can run it. A policy that denies ACTIVITY_TYPE_EXPORT_WALLET and ACTIVITY_TYPE_EXPORT_PRIVATE_KEY for a user or tag stops those users from exporting; the dashboard still shows the Export button, but the activity is rejected when they approve it. Policies do not apply to the root quorum. A root quorum with a threshold of 1 can always export, and there is no setting that removes this ability from root users. To require a second person for every export, raise the root quorum threshold above 1. Each export then goes through the consensus flow above. Keep in mind that the threshold applies to every root action, not only exports. See root quorum best practices for how to structure this. Every export is recorded in the Activity Log and is delivered to your webhooks, so you can monitor for exports even when you cannot prevent them.