Scaling to 100+ million wallets at Privy

When you're managing hundreds of millions of wallets and billions in weekly transactions, you can't afford to miss a single deposit. One dropped webhook means a customer doesn't get paid - or worse, trust evaporates.

Meet Privy

Henri Stern and Asta Li started Privy in 2021 to fix the frustrating UX and security that plagued so many web3 apps. They're on a mission to make crypto wallets and identity infrastructure feel invisible, so users don't have to think about them at all.

Instead of forcing users to wrestle with keys and wallets, they built developer tools that abstracted away user complexity. With Privy, developers could spin up embedded wallets tied to user accounts and keep identity data secure without sacrificing UX.

The approach caught on. In 2022, Sequoia Capital and BlueYard Capital led an $8.3M seed round. Teams like OpenSea, Pump.fun, Klarna, and Hyperliquid built on Privy.

By 2025, their impact was undeniable. They were supporting 100M+ accounts, 1000+ dev teams, and processing billions in transactions. Then Stripe acquired them: a major signal that wallet and identity infrastructure was core for the next wave of embedded finance.

Their mission remains the same: help developers onboard users and manage wallets effortlessly, so anyone can move money and interact onchain.

API calls that move money

Privy started with the goal of helping developers onboard users and manage wallets without making them think about crypto. Their original embedded wallet infrastructure let devs provision wallets tied to each user, but always with the user in the loop.

That changed with the launch of server wallets.

The idea was simple: let apps create and manage wallets programmatically without needing user interaction. This significantly reduces the friction introduced from asking end users to juggle wallets, private keys, and endless popups.

Now, instead of relying on users approving every transaction, developers could spin up wallets on the fly, assign them to users or systems, and manage money flows like deposits, payouts, and transfers entirely via API. This opened the door to powerful new flows:

• Fiat on- and off-ramps embedded directly in apps, converting dollars to stablecoins in seconds
• Onchain payouts and deposits triggered by offchain events
• Cross-network stablecoin flows that worked regardless of the underlying blockchain
• Agent-controlled smart wallets that execute transactions autonomously

But this flexibility came with new technical demands from both Privy and their customers.

They needed to detect the moment that funds were deposited into server wallets so that they could trigger real-time webhooks to downstream systems. Every customer had their own business logic: some triggered payouts, unlocked access to features, sent confirmations, or kicked off complex internal workflows.

Adam Inglehart, a founding engineer at Privy, put it plainly:

“Our customers spin up thousands of server wallets and need to know exactly when funds hit. They define which chains, contracts, and events they care about and rely on webhook notifications to trigger downstream actions. So we’re ultimately going to monitor millions of wallets across chains and fire webhooks when a matching transaction or token transfer hits. That real-time signal powers everything downstream.”

Thus began the search for a partner who could meet their requirements and scale with their pace.

"Goldsky was really the only option"

Privy explored multiple options, but had difficulty finding one that met the demands of their new server wallet infrastructure.

• Limited chain coverage meant constantly stitching together multiple vendors to support their customers' networks
• Unreliable webhook delivery risked dropped notifications - and in a system where every deposit matters, that's unacceptable
• Slow onboarding for new chains left them waiting weeks when users needed support in days
• No testnet parity made staging and QA painful, slowing release cycles
• Rigid architectures forced workarounds instead of letting Privy build on their own terms

After evaluating several data providers, they chose Goldsky for a few reasons, beyond simply meeting performance requirements:

• Broadest multi-chain coverage in the industry, supporting both EVM and non-EVM chains
• Fast onboarding for new chains, including long-tail and emerging chains that Privy's key customers need
• Testnet and mainnet parity, making staging flows easy and reliable
• Native webhook support with at-least-once delivery guarantees
• Ease of setup and developer experience
• Responsive support team that felt like an extension of Privy's own engineering org

"Goldsky has been an essential data partner for our wallet API. The product, ease of use, and solid network coverage have been incredibly impactful to our own velocity, and we're grateful to have Goldsky on our side." — Asta Li, CTO @ Privy

Shipping Privy's new product: server wallets

Integrating Goldsky Turbo pipelines was surprisingly straightforward.

Privy set up pipelines to stream transaction and token transfers directly to their webhook endpoints.

From there, they filter the events streams based on the set of wallet addresses in their system, and the set of contract addresses that their customers subscribe to for deposit (and withdrawal) webhooks. This ensures every customer receives exactly the webhook notifications they need.

To keep things organized and scalable, Privy set up a real-time streaming pipeline per chain. Adding support for a new network was as simple as dropping in a new YAML file (or drag-and-dropping blocks for those using our visual pipeline builder)! Goldsky's pipelines come with at-least-once delivery and automatic backfill and retries, so webhook events don't get dropped even when the receiving service goes down.

This proved critical when Privy's own webhook handler had a blip - Goldsky kept undelivered events in a queue and when Privy's infrastructure came back online, everything recovered automatically. Transactions didn't miss a beat. Even if your own infra misses a step, Goldsky doesn't.

And because Turbo normalizes data across all supported chains, Privy can expand to new networks without rewriting logic or redoing their stack. This approach lets Privy grow on their own terms with infrastructure that scales as fast as their customers, incl. day-one support for Tempo.

Delivering customer value faster

Building on the right infrastructure from day one meant Privy’s engineering team could focus on shipping what their customers need.

Engineering velocity

• 100s of hours saved on multi-chain infrastructure they didn't have to build or maintain
• New chains in hours instead of weeks; adding network support is as simple as a new YAML file

Reliability

• 99.99%+ uptime on webhook delivery across all chains
• Zero dropped webhooks with at-least-once delivery guarantees and automatic retries

Scale

• 100M+ wallets monitored across dozens of networks
• Billions in transactions processed with real-time webhook notifications

Their saved time went into building server wallets, expanding to new networks, and powering use cases they hadn't imagined at launch, like AI agents executing trades, embedded payment flows moving stablecoins, and fintech apps onboarding users in seconds.

Today, Privy is the go-to wallet infrastructure for teams who need wallets to just work. The infrastructure keeps evolving with their customers' needs. But the mission stays constant: making crypto so invisible that users forget they're using it at all.

Unblock your customers and make money move

👋🏻 Hey, we're Goldsky. We help teams like Privy make crypto more usable and secure, with onchain data that powers magical user experiences and moves money. If you're building fintech apps, payment flows, or anything that needs to know when money moves, we'd love to chat to help you ship faster. Sign up for free or schedule a call to see how we can help.

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Max and Kevin catching up in person