How to Leave Cryptocurrency to Your Heirs
A practical guide to crypto inheritance: what your heirs actually need, why a will isn't enough, and the only method that works without trusting a third party.
Over $142 billion in cryptocurrency is estimated to be permanently lost — most of it because owners died without a plan. A will can transfer a house. It cannot transfer a seed phrase.
Why a will isn't enough
A will names beneficiaries. It does not contain the cryptographic key required to unlock your wallet. Your executor can probate your estate, but if they don't have your seed phrase they cannot access your Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other on-chain asset.
Storing the seed phrase in a will also creates a problem: wills become public record upon probate. Anyone can read them.
The three methods — and their tradeoffs
- →Store the seed phrase in a safe and tell your heir verbally where it is. Risk: house fire, burglary, the heir forgets, or you die suddenly before telling them.
- →Give the seed phrase directly to your heir now. Risk: heir is compromised, relationship deteriorates, or the heir dies before you.
- →Use a cryptographic dead man's switch. The seed phrase is encrypted client-side, split into shards via Shamir's Secret Sharing, and delivered automatically only when you stop checking in.
What your heir actually needs
Your heir needs three things: (1) the encrypted vault blob, (2) their shard of the decryption key, and (3) a way to decrypt it in-browser without needing to trust any server. The decryption step must work even if the company providing the service goes offline.
The zero-knowledge requirement
Any inheritance system that requires you to trust a company with your plaintext seed phrase is broken by design. If the company is breached, your keys are exposed. If the company shuts down, your heir loses access.
A properly designed system encrypts your vault locally (AES-256-GCM), stores only ciphertext, and open-sources the decryption code so your heir can run it offline forever.
Start now, not after the next market crash
The worst time to build an inheritance plan is during a crisis. It takes less than 10 minutes to set up a cryptographic dead man's switch. The cost of not doing it is borne entirely by the people you leave behind.
Protect your crypto legacy
VaultPass is a zero-knowledge inheritance protocol. Your seed phrases are encrypted in your browser — we never see them.