INTRODUCTION

Why non-custodial

A custodial payment processor is, by definition, a company that can freeze your account. That's the whole product: convenience in exchange for the right of intervention. Tab declines the trade.

The spectrum

Custody isn't binary. There's a continuum:

• Fully custodial. The processor holds the keys and the funds. Examples: every centralized exchange's payment product, every neobank.
• Semi-custodial. Funds are held in a multisig or MPC arrangement that requires the processor as one of the signers. Better, but still pauseable.
• Non-custodial. The processor never has the authority to move funds without the user's signature. This is where Tab lives.

What you get

Three things fall out of choosing the non-custodial side of that line:

• Censorship resistance. A court order served on Tab can produce a list of public handles. It cannot produce private keys, because we don't have them.
• Counterparty risk goes to zero. If Tab disappears tomorrow, the contracts keep running and your wallet still works. The relayers are nice-to-have, not load-bearing.
• Auditability. Every settled payment is an on-chain event you can reconstruct independently. There's no internal ledger to take on faith.

What you accept

One real cost: there's no password reset. If a user loses both their PIN and their backup, Tab cannot help them recover the wallet — the keys are not ours to give. The whole point of the design is that we couldn't return your money even if a regulator told us to.