Non-Custodial Status in Crypto Wallets Exists on a Spectrum of User Control
A DEV Community article argues that calling a wallet 'non-custodial' is too coarse a label, and that engineers should ask who can move assets, under what conditions, and who must cooperate to end that access. The piece presents a spectrum ordered by the user's unilateral control, starting with plain externally owned accounts, where a single private key governs everything and compromised access cannot be selectively revoked. It then contrasts smart accounts, which allow scoped delegated permissions that the owner can revoke on-chain without operator cooperation, though this introduces contract-level risk. The article also examines embedded wallets with application-controlled secondary signers, where revocation may depend on the operator removing the signer. Overall, the author stresses that the relevant evidence is the actual contract or revocation path rather than the label or a settings toggle.
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