Billions in crypto are lost forever when people die without a plan. Will & Key is a self-custody vault with a dead man's switch: deposit, name your heir, and check in on a schedule you choose. If you ever go silent, your heir inherits — automatically, on chain, with no custodian and no one holding your seed phrase.
Live on Base, source verified. The contract is deployed, running, and readable on Basescan. It has not had a third-party security audit — only our own adversarial review, published in full. Treat it as new software: start with an amount you could afford to lose.
Create a vault with ETH, BNB, or any ERC-20. Name your heir's wallet address, pick your check-in schedule (7 days to 10 years), and set a challenge window. Your keys, your coins — the contract is open source and non-upgradable.
One cheap transaction resets your timer. One click refreshes every vault you own. Miss a check-in because life happened? Nothing fires instantly — your heir must wait out your full inactivity period, and then a challenge window in which you can still veto.
If you truly go silent, your heir claims with their own wallet. After the challenge window passes with no veto from you, anyone can finalize and the funds are theirs. No court, no customer support, no company that needs to still exist.
| Scenario | What happens |
|---|---|
| You lose your wallet | The vault expires on schedule and your heir inherits. This is the designed recovery path. An optional paper-seed check-in chain can keep the vault alive while you coordinate. |
| Your wallet is stolen | A stolen owner key is a stolen vault. Will & Key defends against absence and loss, not against a compromised key — nothing self-custodial can. |
| Your heir loses their wallet | While you're alive: change the heir address in one transaction. Keeping it current is part of owning a vault. |
| We disappear | Nothing changes. The contract keeps running without us. Claims can always be finalized by anyone, and if our fee address is ever unset, no fee is taken at all. |
| We turn evil | We can pause new vault creation. We cannot touch a wei of any vault, block a withdrawal, block a claim, or raise your fee — those are arithmetic facts of the bytecode, not promises. |
No. It is a technical mechanism that transfers on-chain assets, and it operates independently of probate. Estate law varies by country — for anything beyond crypto, and for tax treatment, talk to a professional. Will & Key handles the part lawyers can't: keys.
Nothing fires instantly. Your heir must first wait out your full inactivity period, then claim, then wait a challenge window of at least 7 days — during which any action from your wallet cancels the claim and resets the clock. Choose a schedule that fits your life; most people pick 60–180 days.
The contract lets exactly two addresses move funds: yours (anywhere, any time) and your heir's (only to a claim, only after your timer expires, only through the challenge window). The admin's power is limited to pausing new vault creation and sweeping accidental transfers — the accounting makes vault balances arithmetically unreachable.
Three things: that the vault exists, which wallet address you named for them, and that they should keep that wallet safe. They pay nothing until they claim, and claiming costs cents on an L2. Our guides walk them through it step by step when the time comes.
Base (Ethereum L2) first, BNB Chain next. Check-ins cost about a cent on Base, and the contract needs to outlive you by decades — Ethereum's security inheritance matters more for an inheritance product than for anything else in crypto.
Not by a third party — and we will say so plainly until that changes. What exists is a documented adversarial review we ran ourselves: five independent passes over the contract, then a second round aimed at the fixes from the first, which found that two of them were incomplete. Twelve defects were found and fixed, every one reproduced as a failing test before it was believed. The full report and the tests are in the repository. That is real evidence and it is not the same thing as an outside audit. An inheritance product earns trust slowly or not at all.
Base mainnet, and here are the addresses — check them yourself rather than trusting this
page:
Vault:
0xC821849A1D74959753450409b594b23eCE7fEe2f
Reminders:
0x60749aF621180de1DC05DB4f3d158D09dE979dC6
Both are source-verified on Basescan with an exact bytecode match, so you can
read the code that is actually running rather than taking our word for it. The contract is not
upgradeable: what is deployed there is what will run forever.