Over the past decade, private credit has emerged as an increasingly important source of financing for businesses, and is expected to reach $3.5 trillion in AUM by year-end 2028. Amidst this private credit boom, the team behind the Goldfinch protocol launched Heron Finance to provide investors easy and affordable access to private credit deals in an automated way.
While building Heron Finance on the Goldfinch protocol provides major advantages in terms of cost, transparency, and interoperability, Heron set out to make sure this product was accessible to more people — even investors that had no exposure or interest in blockchain. That’s when they turned to Turnkey.
The problem: Making onchain private credit work for everyone
Heron’s main goal is to make private credit widely accessible. That meant building a user experience which would abstract away the pains and challenges of self-custody, such as writing down a seed phrase or using a pop-up modal to approve transactions.
To do so, they set out to implement a user experience that combined ease of use and familiarity with high security, without relying on traditional usernames and passwords. Furthermore, the solution needed to be scalable, secure, and keep investors in control of their assets.
The solution: AA wallets powered by a Turnkey signer
To streamline the user journey, Heron Finance built an implementation of AA wallets, powered by a Turnkey signer. When a user is onboarded to Heron Finance, they are individually provisioned with a private key unique to them and controlled via passkey, ensuring that only the end user can authorize transactions. Leveraging Turnkey’s passkey authentication feature not only enhanced security, but also maintained the non-custodial essence of crypto while making the platform accessible and user-friendly for most investors.
In short, Heron Finance managed to create a platform that’s easy for a mainstream audience to use, combining the best of crypto with a smooth, web2-like user experience. We’re proud to support them in making finance more accessible, by using onchain technologies to bridge the gap between traditional and decentralized finance.
Heron’s results
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Invisible wallets built right into the Heron Finance app for a web2-like user experience
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Transactions which are secured and authenticated with Turnkey-enabled passkeys
About Heron Finance
As the first robo-advisor for private credit, Heron Finance invests in loans to small and medium sized businesses in the US and globally, then allows accredited investors to participate in those deals. Investors receive steady monthly payments of interest, which they can choose to reinvest on the platform or transfer to another institution. Heron Finance automatically allocates and rebalances investor portfolios, depending on their risk preferences. Their experienced in-house credit team sources and monitors the risk of all deals to maximize returns and reduce risks. Only the most qualified businesses are approved by its credit team. Heron Finance was built by the a16z-backed Warbler Labs team, which also supports the development of the Goldfinch protocol.
About Turnkey
Turnkey is secure, flexible, and scalable wallet infrastructure offering low-level primitives for teams building onchain applications and infrastructure. Founded by the team that built Coinbase Custody, Turnkey is powering serious applications across a wide range of use cases, from wallets-as-a-service to programmatic backend crypto automation. By leveraging a novel security framework, Turnkey achieves 50-100ms signing latency for millions of wallets, all with affordable transaction-based pricing that’s designed for scale.