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.