About Will & Key
Will & Key is an open-source experiment in one narrow problem: helping self-custody crypto reach a chosen beneficiary without giving anyone the owner's seed phrase while the owner is alive.
The problem we are working on
A bank can respond to a court order. A blockchain cannot. If the only person able to sign for a self-custody wallet dies or permanently loses the key, legal ownership alone does not produce a valid transaction. Families therefore need both a lawful estate plan and a technically workable access or transfer mechanism.
Will & Key addresses only the technical transfer mechanism. It does not write a legal will, verify a death, give tax advice, act as executor, hold recovery phrases or decide who should inherit.
What has been built
The project runs a non-upgradeable inheritance-vault contract on Base: version 2, deployed on 28 September 2026, which replaced version 1 (deployed on 9 August 2026 and now retired). An owner can deposit ETH or one of four listed tokens, nominate a beneficiary and choose an inactivity period. If the owner stops checking in, the beneficiary may initiate a claim. A separate challenge period gives the owner time to veto before settlement.
The browser interface is static and served from isolated Cloudflare Pages hosting. Contract source, tests, deployment records, the internal adversarial review and the preliminary audit are maintained in the project repository.
Where the project stands
- Version 2 is live on Base since 28 September 2026. Its code fingerprints and how to check them against the source are on the security page.
- Version 1 had an internal adversarial review (August 2026) and a preliminary audit (September 2026) by AI auditing agents. The audit found no critical or high issues. Version 1 could not be patched, so its contract fixes went into version 2.
- Version 2 has been reviewed only by AI agents of the same kind that wrote it, in five fix-review rounds and a pre-launch review. None of the reviews is independent, and no independent third-party audit of either version has been completed.
- Version 1 is retired: its new-vault creation is paused on chain (transaction), and on 27 September 2026 it held no user funds.
- A full-duration Base Sepolia lifecycle test of version 2 has not been completed.
- Will & Key sends no reminders or alerts. Sales on the retired reminder-billing contract were switched off on chain on 26 September 2026.
Those limitations matter. The contract is immutable, so a serious contract finding would require a new deployment rather than an in-place patch. The website does not recommend using material value before independent review and testnet lifecycle work are complete.
How trust should be evaluated
Do not rely on a brand promise. Read the mechanism explanation, the security and audit status, the contract source and the deployed bytecode. Will & Key aims to make its limits as visible as its features.