Every crypto payment gateway answers one question differently: who holds your money between the moment your customer pays and the moment it reaches you? The answer shapes your risk far more than the headline fee.
Custodial gateways
The gateway receives the payment into its own wallets and credits a balance in your account. You withdraw later, manually or on a schedule.
- Your funds sit with a third party. If the gateway is hacked, insolvent or under investigation, your balance can be frozen or lost.
- Withdrawals are a separate step, often with their own fee, a minimum, and sometimes a review.
- You need an account: sign-up, verification, API keys to protect.
Non-custodial gateways
The gateway never keeps a balance for you. Each payment is forwarded on-chain to your own wallet as soon as it confirms.
- Nothing to freeze. There is no balance on the gateway side, so there is nothing to withdraw and nothing a third party can hold back.
- Each payment settles individually to your wallet, with its own transaction id you can check on a block explorer.
- No account to secure: with TrezorPay you only give the wallet that receives the money.
The trade-offs
A non-custodial gateway still has to touch the payment for a short time: it receives it on a deposit address it controls, waits for the confirmations, then forwards it. With TrezorPay that window is the confirmation time of the network, from seconds to a few minutes, and every forward is visible on-chain.
Two things are your job instead of the gateway's:
- Your wallet's security: the funds land in a wallet you control, so keep its keys safe.
- Your own records: there is no gateway balance or statement. Use the signed callbacks and
/logs/to reconcile payments in your own system.
Which one should you choose?
If you want to avoid counterparty risk, keep control of your funds and integrate without opening an account, choose a non-custodial gateway. If you need the gateway to hold balances for you, for example to pay out later in bulk, a custodial one fits better.
TrezorPay is non-custodial by design: one request creates an address, every payment is forwarded to your wallet minus 1.25%, and a signed callback tells your server about it. See how it works.