Let us get the conflict of interest out of the way in the first paragraph: we use a payment processor. TraceGood's donations run through NOWPayments, which converts to fiat. We are not self-custodying, and an article arguing for self-custody from an organisation that does not self-custody would be worth nothing if it hid that.
What follows is the honest version of a question the guides written by processors do not answer, because the answer might cost them a customer.
What "without a processor" actually means
It means your organisation generates a wallet, publishes the address, and receives cryptocurrency directly. No intermediary, no custodian, no monthly fee, no coin list belonging to someone else.
This is what the Tor Project does, through its own BTCPay server. It is what the Free Software Foundation, Riseup, the GrapheneOS Foundation and the Internet Archive do, each publishing their own addresses. Among humanitarian organisations it is rare — in our research the clearest example is charity: water, which publishes its own addresses for seven coins.
Notice the pattern. Almost every organisation on that list was already running its own technical infrastructure for other reasons.
What you actually gain
No processor cut. Donation platforms take a percentage or a fee. At small volumes this is noise; at larger volumes it is a real number.
No custodian risk. If your processor's custodian freezes, fails or is acquired, your donations are entangled in someone else's problem. Self-custody removes that counterparty entirely.
Coins the processors will not list. This is the serious one. Monero is largely absent from custodial supply chains because of exchange delistings. If you want to accept XMR, running your own wallet is more or less the only route — which is precisely why the charities that accept Monero are almost all self-custodying technical projects.
Credibility with a specific audience. Crypto-native donors notice. Publishing an address is a stronger signal to that crowd than any amount of mission copy.
What it actually costs
Key management becomes a governance problem, not an IT one. Who holds the keys? What happens when that person leaves, or dies, or falls out with the board? A single person holding the keys to charitable funds is a control failure that any competent auditor will flag. The real answer is multi-signature with a documented recovery procedure, which is more work than it sounds and needs to be tested rather than assumed.
Volatility becomes your treasury policy. A processor converts on receipt. Hold the coin yourself and you are making an active decision to be exposed. A charity sitting on an asset that halves between receipt and spending has to explain that to its board and its donors. Deciding to convert manually means somebody has to actually do it, reliably, with authority to act.
Accounting gets harder, not easier. You will need to record fair market value at the moment of receipt, in your reporting currency, for every gift. Processors produce that record automatically. Self-custody means producing it yourself, defensibly, for an auditor who may not know what a block explorer is.
Compliance does not disappear because the intermediary did. Depending on your jurisdiction and size, you may still face obligations around the source of large donations. Removing the processor removes the entity that was quietly handling some of that for you.
Somebody has to be on call. Addresses get rotated, nodes fall over, a chain forks. BTCPay is excellent and still a server that needs patching.
The question that actually decides it
Not "can we?" — most organisations technically can. The question is:
Do you already have someone whose job includes running infrastructure, and a governance structure that can hold keys safely?
If yes, self-custody is a genuine option and the costs above are mostly things you already do.
If no — if adding this means one enthusiastic volunteer becoming the single point of failure for the organisation's money — then a processor is not a compromise, it is the correct engineering decision. Converting immediately and taking the fee is a defensible, boring, grown-up choice.
That is the reasoning behind our own answer. We are small, newly founded, and we would rather spend our attention on making donations verifiable than on becoming a custodian. Our public ledger and the block-explorer link on every confirmed gift do most of the work that self-custody would be signalling anyway.
A middle path worth knowing about
You do not have to choose globally.
Several organisations run a processor for the long tail of coins and publish their own addresses for two or three they care about. You get breadth without taking custody of thirty assets, and depth on the ones your donors actually use.
If you are going to self-custody exactly one coin, the strongest case is the one a processor cannot reach for you.
If you do go direct
- Use multi-signature. Test the recovery path before you publish the address, not after.
- Document who holds what, where it is stored, and what happens when someone leaves. Put it where the board can see it.
- Record value at receipt, automatically if you can.
- Decide your conversion policy in advance and write it down, so it is a policy rather than a series of judgement calls under pressure.
- Publish a ledger — and then actually click through to the explorer every few months. We have found more than one organisation whose transparency page had quietly stopped working.
- Never publish an address you cannot prove you control. If you cannot sign a message with it, you do not control it.
Where we stand
TraceGood accepts more than thirty coins and networks through a processor, converts promptly, and publishes every confirmed donation on our public ledger with a link to an independent block explorer.
We are a newly founded organisation whose registration as a non-profit association in Estonia is not yet complete, and donations to us are not tax-deductible anywhere. Our About page carries the full position.
If you run a charity weighing this up and want to compare notes, get in touch — we would rather the sector made this decision with better information than we had.