Spark support on Turnkey

Spark is a Bitcoin Layer 2 that uses FROST threshold signing across a collective of operators to enable fast, low-fee transfers and Lightning payments without giving up self-custody of the underlying BTC. Turnkey provides enclave-based key management for Spark: your identity key, leaf keys, deposit keys, and Lightning preimages are generated and used inside the Turnkey enclave, and never leave it.

If you don’t know the protocol, read Spark core concepts and Sovereignty first. This page covers what Turnkey adds to a Spark integration.

How Spark works (and where Turnkey fits)

A Spark leaf is an individual unit of BTC held inside the protocol. Leaves are jointly controlled by your identity key and the Spark Operators using FROST threshold signing: no single party can move a leaf, and every leaf operation requires a quorum of operators to co-sign with you. The trust model is 1-of-n: as long as at least one operator is honest, your funds cannot be stolen. If every operator is unavailable you cannot transact, but you can still exit to Bitcoin L1 using transactions pre-signed at deposit time (see Security model).

Three external roles to know:

• Spark Operator (SO). A node in the operator collective that holds a threshold key share for every leaf. The current operators are Lightspark and Flashnet.
• Spark Entity (SE). The SOs acting together. A quorum of the SE is required to authorize any leaf operation.
• Spark Service Provider (SSP). An application-layer service (a wallet backend, an exchange, etc.) that coordinates flows on your behalf: routing Lightning payments, processing static deposits, submitting transfers. The SSP has no key-share authority over leaves; it relies on the SOs for that.

Turnkey is none of these. It runs the secure enclave that holds your identity key and derives leaf keys, deposit keys, and Lightning preimages. When a flow needs your signature, the client calls a Turnkey activity (SPARK_SIGN_FROST, SPARK_PREPARE_TRANSFER, SPARK_CLAIM_TRANSFER, or SPARK_PREPARE_LIGHTNING_RECEIVE) and the enclave does the cryptographic work without returning key material. All communication with SOs and the SSP happens directly from the client; Turnkey is not on those paths.

Turnkey only connects to the client. SO, SSP, and L1 communication happens directly from the client; Turnkey is not on those paths.

Address derivation and key types

Spark uses a unique BIP-32 purpose number (8797555) rather than the standard BIP-44 coin type system. Every Spark key is a hardened child of m/8797555'/{account}', with the next path segment selecting the key type:

Type	Path segment	Per-item derivation	Purpose
IDENTITY	/0'	flat (used as is)	Primary wallet identifier; the key behind ADDRESS_FORMAT_SPARK_* addresses
SIGNING_HD	/1'	hardened child at u32_be(sha256(leaf_id)[0..4]) % 2^31	Base key for per-leaf signing keys
DEPOSIT	/2'	flat (used as is)	Single-use L1 deposit address
STATIC_DEPOSIT_HD	/3'	hardened child at index	Reusable deposit addresses (SSP integration)
HTLC_PREIMAGE_HD	/4'	not exposed for signing; used only for HMAC-SHA256 inside the enclave	Lightning HTLC preimage generation

The supported IDENTITY address formats are:

Network	Address format	HRP
Mainnet	ADDRESS_FORMAT_SPARK_MAINNET	spark
Regtest	ADDRESS_FORMAT_SPARK_REGTEST	sparkrt

When creating a wallet account via the Turnkey dashboard or API, select ADDRESS_FORMAT_SPARK_MAINNET or ADDRESS_FORMAT_SPARK_REGTEST and the identity path will be set automatically. Only secp256k1 keys are supported; ed25519 keys will be rejected.

Schnorr signing on the identity key

Spark payloads signed with the identity key use plain BIP-340 Schnorr, without the Taproot key tweak that Bitcoin P2TR addresses require (see Bitcoin Schnorr signatures and tweaks for the contrast). Turnkey picks the right signing scheme from the address format on your key:

Address type	Signing scheme
Bitcoin P2TR	Tweaked Schnorr (BIP-341)
Spark Mainnet/Regtest	Plain Schnorr (BIP-340)
All others	ECDSA

Use SIGN_RAW_PAYLOAD with the Spark address as signWith to produce a plain-Schnorr signature. The hashFunction field should match how the payload was prepared (e.g. HASH_FUNCTION_NO_OP for a pre-hashed payload). The returned signature always has V = "00" since Schnorr signatures do not carry a recovery ID.

This identity-key signing path is sufficient on its own for token operations via the Spark SDK (@buildonspark/spark-sdk, @buildonspark/issuer-sdk). The FROST-based flows below require the additional Spark-specific activities.

For more information on Spark keys and address derivation, see documentation here.

Turnkey activities for Spark

Four activities cover the Spark-specific cryptographic operations. All of them run inside the enclave; none return key material to the client.

Activity	What it does
SPARK_SIGN_FROST	Returns the enclave’s FROST signature share for a sighash, or for a batch of them in one call. Used by deposits, withdrawals, transfers, and static deposit claims.
SPARK_PREPARE_TRANSFER	Sender side of a transfer. Produces an encrypted transfer package: per-leaf key tweaks Feldman-VSS-split for the SOs, the recipient’s new leaf key ECIES-encrypted to their identity public key, and your identity-key ECDSA signature over the whole thing.
SPARK_CLAIM_TRANSFER	Receiver side of a transfer. Decrypts the inbound leaf-key ciphertext with your identity key, derives the new leaf key, and packages the claim tweak shares for the SOs.
SPARK_PREPARE_LIGHTNING_RECEIVE	Returns only the paymentHash for a freshly generated Lightning preimage. The preimage itself is created inside the enclave, Feldman-split across the SOs (each share ECIES-encrypted to its operator), and never leaves whole. The hash is what you put in the BOLT11 invoice.

These don’t replace Turnkey’s existing primitives. Spark flows also use CREATE_WALLET_ACCOUNTS to derive new deposit and signing keys, SIGN_RAW_PAYLOAD for identity-key Schnorr signatures, SIGN_TRANSACTION for the Bitcoin L1 transactions that fund deposits or receive cooperative withdrawals, and EXPORT_WALLET_ACCOUNT in exactly one flow — see Static deposits export a key from the enclave.

Supported operations

Turnkey supports every Spark wallet operation. For a runnable walkthrough of each flow, including the exact sequence of Turnkey, SO, and SSP calls, see the SDK example.

Operation	Direction	Turnkey activities used
Deposit	Bitcoin L1 → Spark (single-use address; also produces the pre-signed exit transactions)	SIGN_TRANSACTION, SPARK_SIGN_FROST
Cooperative withdrawal	Spark → Bitcoin L1 (fast path; requires SO co-signing; falls back to unilateral exit below if SOs are unavailable)	SPARK_SIGN_FROST, SPARK_PREPARE_TRANSFER
Unilateral exit	Spark → Bitcoin L1 (emergency path; no SO cooperation needed)	none at exit time; broadcasts the pre-signed transactions created during deposit
Transfer	Spark → Spark	SPARK_SIGN_FROST, SPARK_PREPARE_TRANSFER (sender); SPARK_SIGN_FROST, SPARK_CLAIM_TRANSFER (receiver)
Lightning receive	Lightning → Spark	SPARK_PREPARE_LIGHTNING_RECEIVE
Lightning send	Spark → Lightning	SPARK_SIGN_FROST, SPARK_PREPARE_TRANSFER
Static deposit	Bitcoin L1 → Spark (reusable address)	CREATE_WALLET_ACCOUNTS, EXPORT_WALLET_ACCOUNT, SIGN_TRANSACTION
Token transfer	Spark token operations (mint, transfer)	SIGN_RAW_PAYLOAD

Security model

Pre-signed exit transactions are seed-phrase-equivalent

When you deposit BTC into Spark, the deposit flow pre-signs two Bitcoin L1 transactions inside the Turnkey enclave: a branch transaction and a timelocked exit transaction. These are your unilateral exit path. If every Spark Operator goes offline or acts maliciously, you can broadcast them directly to Bitcoin L1 and recover your BTC without operator cooperation. Per the Spark sovereignty docs, exiting can take “as little as 100 blocks” (~16 hours) — the actual wait depends on leaf depth and how recently the leaf was transferred, since timelocks decrement at each transfer.

The corollary: these transactions must be stored durably. If they are lost and the SOs are unavailable, your recovery path is gone. Treat them with the same care as a seed phrase — durable, encrypted, off-device storage, with backups. The Turnkey enclave does not retain them; it signs them once at deposit time and returns them to the client.

This is the property that makes Spark Operator unavailability a liveness concern rather than a safety concern: you may not be able to transact, but you can always exit.

Static deposits export a key from the enclave

Static deposit addresses are reusable: one address can receive many deposits, each creating a separate Spark leaf. To make that work, the SSP needs to process deposits while your wallet is offline, which means it needs co-signing capability on the static deposit key. This is the only Spark flow that uses EXPORT_WALLET_ACCOUNT to take a raw private key out of the Turnkey enclave.

From the moment the static deposit key is shared with the SSP until you claim any deposits made to that address, the SSP holds co-signing capability. This is the intentional custodial tradeoff of static deposits. To minimize exposure:

• Use a fresh ephemeral P-256 keypair for each export and zero it immediately after decrypting.
• Transmit the key to the SSP only over an encrypted channel.
• Zero the key in your local memory immediately after transmission.
• Only use SSPs you trust: a compromised SSP holding this key can co-sign spends from the static deposit address.

If you don’t need a reusable receiving address, prefer single-use deposits. They keep key material inside the enclave throughout.

Communication with SOs and the SSP is outside Turnkey

Every Spark flow involves direct calls from the client to the Spark Operators (for nonce commitments, partial signatures, leaf state queries, and claim submissions) and, for some flows, to the SSP. Turnkey is not on these network paths and does not see this traffic. The client SDK is responsible for SO and SSP communication; the Turnkey enclave is responsible for the cryptographic operations on key material. The SDK example shows where each of these responsibilities sits.

SDK example

The canonical reference for integrating Turnkey with Spark is examples/with-spark in the Turnkey SDK monorepo. It contains:

• A Turnkey-backed Spark signer (TurnkeySparkSigner) that plugs into the Spark SDK.
• End-to-end runnable flows for deposit, transfer (send + claim), withdrawal, Lightning receive and send, and static deposit.
• Token-operation scripts (create, mint, transfer) using the issuer SDK.
• Comments mapping each step to the actor model above.

If you’re integrating Spark, start with the SDK example and refer back to this page for the conceptual model and the security notes.

Additional resources

• Spark addressing specification
• Spark identity-key derivation
• BIP-340: Schnorr Signatures for secp256k1

If you’re building on Spark and have questions about integrating with Turnkey, contact us at [e-mail], on X, or on Slack.