Non custodial

How does it work?

You give the provider an extended public key from your wallet. It derives a fresh receiving address per payment, shows that to your customer, and monitors the chain. When a matching payment confirms, it tells your server. At no point does the provider hold a private key or a balance, which the custody guide explains in full.

What does it cost you?

Fiat settlement, mostly. A provider that never receives your funds cannot convert them, so volatility management becomes your treasury problem, and stablecoins are the usual answer and a bank payout becomes a separate arrangement.

Key custody also becomes yours. That is a genuine operational responsibility, and businesses that lose access to a wallet lose the money as completely as they would in a provider insolvency.

Who should use it?

Businesses in the catalogue that intend to hold crypto anyway, particularly stablecoins, lose almost nothing by going non custodial and gain the removal of the one unrecoverable risk. Businesses whose finance function will not carry a crypto balance need a custodial provider and should focus on settlement terms instead.

The risk you take on instead

Key custody, and it fails differently from provider insolvency. Insolvency is somebody else’s decision; a lost recovery phrase is yours, and it is more common than the failure it replaces.

Treat the wallet as a business continuity problem rather than a security one. More than one person able to recover it, stored somewhere that survives both an office and an employee departure. A wallet whose phrase exists in one place known to one person is a single point of failure wearing a security posture.