Custodial vs non-custodial payments

In a custodial model, the gateway receives your customers' payments into wallets it controls, then settles the balance to you on some schedule. In a non-custodial model, each payment goes to an address derived from your own wallet, so the funds are yours the instant they land on-chain.

Everything else, fees, payout timing, freeze risk, follows from that one difference. If a provider can hold your money, it can also delay it, take a cut, or, in the worst case, freeze it.

Custodial gateways typically charge a percentage per transaction and pay out on a delay, sometimes holding a reserve. Because there's an account, there's also an entity that can review your business, apply limits, or close you, exactly the deplatforming problem that pushes high-risk industries toward crypto in the first place.

None of that is malice; it's the nature of holding other people's money under regulation. But it means a custodial gateway reintroduces the very middleman crypto was supposed to remove.

With a non-custodial gateway, payment addresses derive from a seed only you hold. The software watches the chain and confirms payments, but it never signs or moves funds. You can verify on-chain that every address belongs to your wallet.

That means no payout schedule, no reserve, no per-transaction cut, and no account anyone can freeze. The trade-off is responsibility: you hold the keys, so you back them up and you secure them.