The term “non-custodial” refers to any asset management or asset storage solution that does not cause the asset’s owner to forfeit their private keys to the solution.
Within the cryptocurrency and digital asset industry, the term is commonly encountered when dealing with wallets. A wallet can either be custodial or non-custodial. Unlike its centralized counterpart, a non-custodial solution is decentralized in nature, it does not store the private/public key pairs within its environment, and it never makes backups “for security purposes”.