Most "crypto inheritance" guides are written by companies selling you a product. This isn't that.
Why this is hard
Your crypto is held by your private key. When you die, your private key doesn't die with you, but your family doesn't get it either. The coins just sit there, on the blockchain, in a wallet no one can access. **An estimated 4 million BTC is in permanently inaccessible wallets** — a meaningful fraction of all Bitcoin that will ever exist.
This isn't a hypothetical. It happens. A lot. The 23-year-old who bought a few Bitcoin in 2012 and got hit by a car in 2015, with a paper wallet in a drawer and a family that doesn't know what it is. The early Ethereum holder who told no one and passed peacefully in their sleep. Every story ends the same way: coins lost forever.
The minimum viable plan
You don't need a "crypto estate service" to do this right. You need three things:
- **A clear, written record that crypto exists.** A single page in a safe or with a lawyer, listing: what you own, where the wallet is, and how to access it.
- **A way for a trusted person to recover the wallet.** This is the actual hard part. There are several approaches, listed below.
- **A trusted executor who knows where the record is and what to do with it.** Family, lawyer, or a combination.
That's it. Everything else is optimization.
The hard part: giving someone access without giving them access now
The fundamental tension: you don't want to give your spouse or kids your seed phrase (because then they have access today, and the temptation is real, and you might not be on your deathbed yet), but you do want them to have access if you die. The options:
**Shamir Backup (SLIP-39).** Split the seed into 3-of-5 shares. You hold 2, your spouse holds 1, your lawyer holds 1, a bank safe deposit box holds 1. Any 3 can reconstruct. This is the cleanest solution. Trezor supports it natively; some other wallets can be made to.
**Multi-signature wallet.** A wallet that requires 2-of-3 or 3-of-5 signatures to move funds. You set up 3 keyholders (you, your spouse, your lawyer) on 3 different devices, and any 2 can move funds. More complex to set up, but more robust against single points of failure (and more resistant to one person being compromised).
**A "dead man's switch" service.** A trusted service that emails your seed phrase to a designated recipient if you fail to check in for N months. There are real services that do this. The trust model is real: you're trusting them not to leak early, not to be hacked, and not to be subpoenaed. Reasonable for moderate amounts, not for life savings.
**A simple paper backup in a safe.** The most boring solution. You write down the seed, you put it in a safe or a bank safe deposit box, and your family knows it's there. The risk: if you're alive but incapacitated (e.g. stroke), the family may not be able to access the safe. Lawyer-involved solutions mitigate this.
**A password manager with a master password split across family.** Also valid for moderate amounts. The failure mode is the password manager getting hacked, which is different from the failure mode of "family can't access."
What to actually do
Start here: - Write a single-page document. "I own crypto. Here's what I own and where the wallet is. Here's how to access it." - Choose one of the above mechanisms for giving your executor access. - Store the document and the access mechanism in separate, secure locations. - Tell one trusted person the document exists. Not what it says, just that it exists. - Update it annually.
This takes an afternoon. It will save your family thousands of hours and a meaningful fraction of your net worth.
What not to do
- Don't put your seed phrase in your will. Wills become public records.
- Don't give your seed phrase to a single person now, "just in case." They have it forever, and so does anyone they tell.
- Don't trust a "crypto inheritance" product without reading what happens if the company disappears.
- Don't delay this because you don't have "enough" crypto. The amount grows. The plan should already exist.
The whole point is that someone you trust can, on the worst day of their life, find a single document, follow simple instructions, and recover what you built.