Agent Wallet Comparison: Fireblocks vs. Turnkey vs. Privy

A side-by-side comparison across delegation models, where spend limits are enforced, how authority is revoked, payment protocol coverage, and what happens to the money after an agent pays. Compare core elements to help PSPs, fintechs, and platform teams choose infrastructure for agentic payments that a risk function will approve.

What to Look for in Agent Wallet Infrastructure

Creating a wallet and signing a transaction were solved years ago. What is new is handing spending authority to software that decides on its own when to spend, then having to explain that arrangement to a compliance team, a card scheme, or an auditor.

That reframes the evaluation away from SDK developer experience, and three questions decide most of it:

• Where the delegation boundary is enforced: If spend limits live in the agent’s own code, a compromised or confused agent removes them. Limits enforced by an independent policy layer at the infrastructure level, outside both the agent and the application, hold even when the agent misbehaves.
• How authority is scoped and revoked: Ask what dimensions a permission can be scoped along, whether per transaction, per period, per merchant, per contract method, or per time window. Also consider how fast a user or operator can pull authority back.
• What happens after the agent pays: Someone still has to receive the payment, screen it, off-ramp it, reconcile it, and produce settlement data an auditor will accept. If that half is missing, it becomes your engineering backlog.

The factors that surface later in procurement:

• Protocol coverage and lock-in: x402, MPP, AP2, ACP, and the card schemes’ agent protocols are all moving. Building against one standard is a bet, so support across protocols matters more than depth in any single one.
• Compliance at agent speed: Screening that assumes a human clicking a button does not survive machine-initiated micropayments. Checks have to run pre-transaction and at machine latency.
• Chain and asset breadth: An agent paying an arbitrary merchant does not get to choose the settlement asset or network, so coverage limits become checkout failures.
• Custody clarity: Some models give the developer’s backend control of the wallet, which is convenient but changes who is holding customer funds.
• Audit trail granularity: Agent-initiated spending creates a supervisory question no human-initiated flow does, and the answer is a per-decision log showing which rule authorized which payment.

Compare: Fireblocks vs. Turnkey vs. Privy

Fireblocks vs. Turnkey

When Fireblocks is the better choice:

You want the agent layer, compliance screening, and settlement to arrive as a product rather than as your roadmap, you want key management that never assembles a full private key during signing, and you need a payments compliance stack instead of a shared responsibility model that assigns it to you.

Key Highlights of Fireblocks vs. Turnkey:

• Key architecture under the delegation: Fireblocks embedded wallets use TSS-MPC, so a full private key is never constructed, and the key that decrypts a backup is held by the user rather than by Fireblocks. Turnkey generates complete private keys and decrypts them for use inside AWS Nitro Enclaves, so the delegation model rests on a complete key existing inside one hardware environment.
• Product versus primitives: Turnkey’s documentation calls Delegated Access a primitive, and states that Turnkey intentionally prioritizes low-level primitives in its product to avoid creating blockers for developers. That is an accurate description and a deliberate choice. Fireblocks ships the delegation model, the merchant acceptance gateway, the compliance checks, and the settlement reporting as configured products, which is a meaningfully different lift.
• Compliance ownership: Fireblocks runs pre-transfer KYT and Travel Rule checks on every agentic payment. Turnkey’s Terms of Service require the customer to comply with “anti-money laundering (AML) laws, economic sanctions, money-transmission laws,” and state that “Turnkey’s sole responsibility is to execute a Transaction Request that conforms to the Policy Rules.” A regulated buyer builds and maintains that screening layer alongside the wallet.
• The receiving side: Fireblocks routes inbound agent payments into Vaults through a hosted x402 facilitator, with conversion, off-ramp, and reconciliation on the same platform. Turnkey’s published products cover the paying side, so merchant acceptance, conversion and settlement reporting are a separate build or a separate vendor.
• Uniformity across ecosystems: Fireblocks applies one delegation and policy model across every chain its embedded wallets support, covering every EVM network, Solana, Bitcoin, and Sui, on a platform with 150+ chains integrated. Turnkey has been shipping policy engines per ecosystem, with Solana and TRON announced separately from the original surface, which means agent behavior can differ by network during a rollout.
• Identity and audit depth: Fireblocks ships SAML 2.0 and OIDC single sign-on with SCIM provisioning and per-decision audit logging tied to the rule that authorized each payment. Turnkey’s public documentation covers passkeys, OAuth, email and SMS one-time passcodes, and MFA on sensitive actions, and documents bringing your own OIDC provider. As of 16 September 2026 it does not reference SAML or SCIM, and Turnkey’s documented bring-your-own-auth path covers OIDC authentication rather than directory provisioning, so teams with a SCIM requirement should confirm it with Turnkey.

Summary:

Turnkey’s Delegated Access is the closest architectural match to Fireblocks in this comparison, and the design is sound. Policy is evaluated before any signature is produced, and the separation is stated clearly. The end user owns the wallet, the agent operates within the rules, and the agent receives signatures rather than keys. For a team with engineering capacity that wants to own the agent layer, this is capable infrastructure.

Fireblocks leads on how much of the system arrives finished, and on what sits underneath the delegation. Signing is one part of an agent payment, sitting alongside compliance, acceptance, conversion, and reconciliation, and every piece Turnkey deliberately leaves open is a piece a PSP or fintech has to build and then defend in an audit. Fireblocks Agentic Payments Suite covers the full lifecycle from a user setting delegation rules through to funds settling in a merchant wallet with a complete audit trail.

Fireblocks vs. Privy

When Fireblocks is the better choice:

You need key management that never reconstructs a private key, a clear custody answer for legal, and consistent behavior across every chain and asset an agent might use.

Key Highlights of Fireblocks vs. Privy:

• Who holds the keys: Fireblocks embedded wallets use TSS-MPC, so a full private key is never assembled during signing and the wallet stays under user custody while the agent holds scoped, revocable authority. Privy uses Shamir’s Secret Sharing across an enclave share sealed to an AWS Nitro Enclave and an auth share Privy holds, recombined into a complete key inside the enclave in order to sign, so both shares are provider-hosted.
• Where the rules are evaluated: Fireblocks checks every agent payment against the user’s rules in the embedded wallet policy engine before anything executes, and anything outside those rules is refused outright rather than held for review. Privy’s own materials state that keys are reconstituted inside secure enclaves and that policy is evaluated before a signature is produced. Privy’s own documentation describes signing as recombining the two shares into a complete private key inside the enclave. For example, limiting transfer sizes requires transaction simulation which runs outside the enclave today.”
• Who controls the wallet: Privy documents two authorization models. In the first, which Privy calls agent-owned wallets, the agent or the application’s backend holds the authorization key that triggers signing and can transact without prompting the user. That is convenient and it raises a custody question worth settling with counsel before launch. On Fireblocks, delegation issues a scoped key share on user approval, access never extends past the operations the user approved, and the user can revoke it at any time.
• Consistency across chains: Fireblocks applies one delegation model across every chain its embedded wallets support, covering every EVM network, Solana, Bitcoin, and Sui, on a platform with 150+ blockchains integrated. Privy covers EVM, Solana, Tempo and TRON at its top tier, with Sui, Stellar, Aptos and Near a tier down, and Bitcoin, Cosmos and TON lowest, so an agent’s capabilities depend on which network a merchant happens to settle on.
• Compliance built for payments: Fireblocks runs pre-transfer KYT and Travel Rule checks on agentic payments and validates policy before execution. Privy documents KYC and KYB through partner providers, documents sanctions screening through wallet policies and integration recipes rather than as a managed compliance service, and documents Travel Rule handling through its fiat partners rather than as a product of its own.
• The acceptance side and the ecosystem question: Fireblocks provides neutral white-label acceptance infrastructure for PSPs through Fireblocks Flow. Privy is a Stripe company, its custodial wallets are operated through Bridge, also a Stripe company, and its agentic commerce reference implementation is built on Stripe’s machine payments. For a payments company, that concentrates wallet, custody and settlement inside a competitor’s corporate group.

Summary:

Privy moved early and intelligently here. Shipping a reference implementation for programmatic payments before most competitors had a position showed a clear read on where the category was going. Nested key quorums and manual approvals are genuine governance features, and offering both a developer-owned and a user-owned delegation model gives teams a real choice. For a consumer app already on Privy adding agent flows, this is a solid path.

Fireblocks leads once the deployment has to answer to something other than a product roadmap. TSS-MPC never assembles a full private key during signing, which removes the reconstruction step Privy’s model depends on, non-custodial wallets remove the ambiguity of a developer-controlled wallet, and pre-transaction compliance checks are what let a regulated fintech ship agent spending at all. Revolut and Bitso operate consumer platforms at the scale where those distinctions stop being theoretical.

Why Teams Choose Fireblocks for Agent Wallets

• Delegation enforced where the agent cannot reach it: Spend limits, merchant allowlists, time windows, and method-level rules are evaluated by the embedded wallet policy engine before a transaction executes, independent of the agent’s own code, with anything outside the rules refused rather than queued for review.
• Funds stay under user custody: TSS-MPC key management never constructs a full private key during signing, so a fintech’s users delegate scoped, revocable spending authority to an agent without handing over custody of the underlying assets, and the business provisioning the wallet never has to custody funds.
• Both halves of the transaction: Agentic Wallets cover the agent that pays and the Agentic Payments Suite covers the merchant that receives, with a hosted x402 facilitator routing inbound payments into Fireblocks Vaults.
• Compliance that runs at machine speed: Pre-transfer KYT and Travel Rule checks apply to every agentic payment, with policy validated before execution rather than reviewed afterward.
• No protocol lock-in: x402 and MPP are supported today with room for emerging standards, and Fireblocks joined the x402 Foundation to contribute a security extension covering request integrity and transaction controls.
• Settlement data an auditor accepts: Offramp, conversion, and reconciliation run on one platform, producing a complete audit trail and structured settlement data for agent-initiated flows.

Agent spending is the first category where the payer is software and the supervisor is still human. That gap is what the delegation boundary has to close, on the same infrastructure carrying $16T in lifetime digital asset transactions for 2,400 organizations across more than 100 countries.

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Last Updated: September 2026. Competitive comparisons are based on publicly available information. Features and capabilities are subject to change.