September 25, 2026
Rented payment gateways and traditional digital checkouts extensively leak transaction telemetry to 3rd-party data brokers. Forgoing traditional merchant middleware for custom, closed-loop crypto processing delivers absolute transaction speeds, eliminates middleman fees, and secures total data privacy.
Checkout on typical payment infrastructure leaks far more data than most customers realise. Whether they pay via card, PayPal, or Stripe, their data travels through several companies that log the transaction, assess it for fraud, and share insights with partners. For most businesses, this isn’t a major concern — in fact, it protects them against costly chargebacks. But when privacy is your business, that apathy undermines your product.
At Liber, we believe that if you promise privacy, you should build proprietary transaction infrastructure tailored to your customers’ expectations. To understand why, you need to look at what happens behind the scenes during a standard checkout.
While many consumers don’t spend their time thinking about payment technicalities, the reality is that a card payment isn’t a two-party exchange. It passes through the customer’s issuing bank, the card network, the merchant's acquirer, a payment processor, often a gateway, and often a fraud-scoring layer. That’s potentially six additional parties receiving the transaction record, each with its own commercial interest in storing it.
A U.S. PIRG investigation found that Mastercard sells cardholder transaction data through third-party data marketplaces and its in-house data and services division. Users are packaged into “audiences” based on their spending habits, with aggregated data used to target those who spend big on specific categories, meet certain age groups, and more.
In response, Mastercard said that it doesn’t sell personal cardholder data for targeted advertising. That’s likely true, but while the data probably isn’t considered PII in a legal context, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a privacy invasion. Most users don’t expect their unrelated purchases to be used for targeted advertising.
Additionally, as PIRG points out, while aggregating and anonymizing data reduces some risks, it doesn’t stop companies from reaching individual users. Tools connected to data marketplaces allow them to narrow down users to specific locations or by past spending habits. It’s not hard to see how even anonymised data that includes full spending history and location metadata could be combined with other analytics to figure out a user’s real identity.
Wallets like PayPal, Google Pay, or Apple Pay aren’t any better. In 2024, PayPal updated its US privacy statement to say it would share the information it gathered with participating merchants for personalised shopping. Even the widely used Stripe doesn’t use a cross-merchant behavioural profile to detect fraud, even if it doesn’t sell ads.
The bottom line is that the transaction fee is only half of the cost with payment providers. The other part is your customer’s transaction footprint, which may be handed to other parties without your input.
Virtual card providers add a privacy-enhancing step early in the chain by providing users with a masked virtual card. Other software includes browser extensions that generate burner numbers, or “privacy-first” wallets. These tools do aid privacy by reducing the information that merchants see. They, however, do little to change what the financial system sees.
Virtual card providers must follow certain banking and card network obligations to issue cards. This includes gathering know your customer (KYC) information to verify who you are, and fraud controls to monitor how and where you interact.
Providers are usually upfront and transparent about this. Privacy.com, for example, says it collects the minimum data required to stay compliant with regulations but does not sell user information for advertising. Unfortunately, it must collect when, where, and how a purchase happens, including device metadata, mobile network data, IP addresses, and third-party identity data to assess risk.
As a result, they do not address the following:
Ultimately, virtual card providers are useful protection against breaches, subscription bloat, free trial traps, and card-based cross-merchant tracking. That’s still valuable, but it still doesn’t address some of users’ biggest privacy concerns.
A business looking to provide the best payment privacy to its customers needs two things: ownership of the entire payment loop and no legal requirement to collect KYC. Unfortunately, in traditional payment infrastructure, this is something of a paradox. Setting up a fully closed-loop payment system would mean setting up your own bank, card issuer, payment processor, and more. At that point, most countries require you by law to collect information about your customers to prevent fraud and money laundering.
The solution is to forgo traditional payment systems entirely. Leveraging cryptocurrency allows organizations to handle the flow from invoice generation to payment receipt without asking for KYC information or relying on third parties.
For Liber, custom payment gateway engineering started with a simple rule: nothing that touches payment data should be loaded from someone else’s domain. When creating BLPay, this let us ensure no third-party code ran on the website while users entered their details, and that no trackers collected IP addresses and device signals. The customer's data reaches one company: the merchant. BLPay generates a unique address per payment, watches the chain itself, and credits the balance directly, with no third party in between.
Owning the loop also meant we could avoid decisions a processor would make for us. Decisions like 20-minute invoice expiry, privacy browser bans, manual refund processes, or no zero-confirmation transactions. Fees, while small, were also part of the equation: cutting them out allowed us to pass the savings on to customers.
Owning the payment stack lets you decide when a payment counts. In the case of Bitcoin, that means support for features such as zero-confirmation payments. To explain, when someone makes a cryptocurrency payment, it appears on the network almost immediately. Over the following minutes, the network confirms the transaction as legitimate. Accept early, and there’s an increased risk of a payment being dropped or replaced. Wait for too many confirmations, and the customer could be waiting half an hour or more to get started.
You also get to decide where to draw the line. Third-party payment processors tend to be very risk-averse: they process millions of payments per day, some of them quite large. A smaller service can tailor confirmations to their specific use case. They can require fewer confirmations for old accounts and more for large sums, or accept zero confirmations but use risk mitigation strategies such as mempool monitoring.
Owning proprietary transaction infrastructure allows you to make assurances competitors can’t on privacy, transaction speed, and data ownership. Perhaps even more importantly, though, it shapes what you can sell, who you can sell to, and whether you can sell at all.
In 2025, Steam and itch.io removed or delisted thousands of adult games after a campaign group lobbied payment processors. While the platforms likely didn’t agree internally with the decision, pressure from the processors caused them to cave, since losing card payment support would have been catastrophic.
There have been more extreme, politically charged cases. WikiLeaks was cut off from donations by Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Bank of America after its 2010 diplomatic cables leak. In 2022, PayPal temporarily closed the Free Speech Union's accounts.
The most common issue, however, is “death by a thousand cuts”. Mastercard charges higher chargeback fees for merchants with high chargeback rates. On top of the already lost business due to the chargeback, fines can balloon to hundreds of thousands of dollars and may eventually result in termination.
With in-house crypto billing architecture:
To be clear, owning payment infrastructure does not absolve a merchant of legal obligations, nor should it. You still have anti-money laundering obligations and need a clear acceptable use policy and abuse process. The difference is that the rules come from the law and your own policies, not from a third party or whatever campaign group has the card network's ear. That gives customers the assurance that, so long as they act within the law and your policies, you’ll have their back.
The typical objection to hosting your own payment infrastructure is that hosted crypto gateways already exist. They’re cheaper than card processors, faster to set up, and don’t ask customers for a card number.
All of this is true — a crypto gateway will be an improvement in all of those areas compared to a traditional payment provider. But it still fails to address many of them: its script still runs on your checkout, it still likely sees your customers' IP addresses, emails, and invoice history, and it often holds the funds and can therefore freeze them. It also operates under its own policies, risk assessments, and procedures rather than yours.
Self-hosted open-source tools such as BTCPay Server get much closer, with no custodian, third-party scripts, or fees. Where it falls short, however, is integration with the product. Additional work is required to integrate naturally with billing, balances, and so on. That’s where a proprietary solution really shines.
Building and running self-hosted payment rails might be easier than you think, but it isn’t trivial. You need the engineering skills to build the system and run the nodes, carry a higher support burden, and have to hedge against crypto volatility. For some companies, those trade-offs just don’t make sense.
For privacy-focused platforms, however, it’s the opposite. They know that outsourcing payments is an architectural flaw. What stops them is the expertise and time investment required to fix it.
A full-stack partner like Liber helps to address that dilemma by building and running infrastructure end-to-end, delivering the benefits of sovereign payment infrastructure without the operational burden of creating and maintaining it.
Ultimately, we believe a privacy promise is only as strong as the stack behind it, and safeguarding your users requires a payment rail engineered to protect them.