Comparison
Non-custodial
vs custodial
The difference comes down to one question: when the provider disappears, who can still move the money? Everything else follows from the answer.
We hold no funds, and this page states what that costs, not only what it buys.
The question
Custody is not a feature. It is who holds the keys
A custodial provider takes your assets onto their own addresses and gives you an account balance saying how much is yours. A non-custodial one never touches them.
Your balance is their promise
In a custodial account the tokens are theirs on-chain. What you hold is a claim against a company, and a claim is only ever as good as the company behind it.
Withdrawal is permission
Because they hold the assets, moving them out is a request rather than an action. It can be delayed, limited or frozen, for good reasons and for bad ones.
Failure is total
When a custodian is breached, halts withdrawals or enters insolvency, users learn that their claim and their assets were two different things at the worst possible moment.
In practice
What non-custodial looks like day to day
The workflow is ours. The assets never are.
- 1
You create the Safe
The Safe contract is deployed with your people as its owners. WorkTGT is not an owner of it and has no mechanism to become one later.
- 2
We prepare, you sign
The app builds the transaction and shows what it will do. The signature itself comes from your signers' own wallets, never from a key on our servers.
- 3
The record is ours, the money is not
What WorkTGT stores is the request, the approval and the audit trail. The assets stay exactly where they have been the entire time.
- 4
You can leave at any time
Stop paying and your Safe still works. There is no withdrawal to request on the way out, because nothing of yours was ever being held.
Side by side
What actually differs
Custodial services are not worse at everything. They are worse on the axes a treasury is judged on.
- Who holds the assets
- Custodial providerThe provider, on addresses they own
- WorkTGT (non-custodial)Your Safe, on addresses your team owns
- Moving funds out
- Custodial providerA withdrawal request the provider approves
- WorkTGT (non-custodial)A signature threshold your own owners meet
- If the provider fails
- Custodial providerYour funds form part of the estate
- WorkTGT (non-custodial)Your Safe keeps working; it never depended on us
- Losing your access
- Custodial providerSupport can restore your account
- WorkTGT (non-custodial)Nobody can restore a lost key for you
- Getting started
- Custodial providerAn email and a password, in minutes
- WorkTGT (non-custodial)A Safe and signer wallets to set up first
- Who can freeze you
- Custodial providerThe provider or its banks, unilaterally
- WorkTGT (non-custodial)Only your own signers
Rows four and five are the honest cost of non-custody: no support desk can recover a lost key, and setup genuinely takes longer. We think that trade is right for a treasury and wrong for pocket money.
Questions about custody
Is non-custodial always safer?
No. It removes the provider as a point of failure and moves the weight onto your own key management. If nobody on the team can hold a key safely, a custodian may genuinely be the better choice.
Can WorkTGT freeze or seize our funds?
No. We are not an owner of your Safe and hold no keys to it. If we shut down tomorrow, your Safe and its balance are entirely unaffected.
What can you actually see?
The requests, approvals and audit records created in your workspace, plus the public on-chain state of the Safe address you point us at. That is the same thing any block explorer shows.
What happens if we stop paying?
You lose the workflow, not the money. Access to the app ends; the Safe, its owners and its balance are untouched by that.
Move your team's money
transparently, starting today
Start free without a credit card. Setup takes five minutes, and your funds stay inside your team's Safe.