Guides

Self-custody solves one problem completely and creates another one quietly. Holding your own keys means no exchange can freeze your balance, no custodian can fail with your coins on its books, and no counterparty stands between you and your money. It also means that the single piece of information protecting everything you own is a secret nobody else has — and death does not transfer secrets.

That is the whole of the inheritance problem, and it does not have a comfortable answer. The ways people usually reach for are worse than they look. Writing a seed phrase into a will publishes it, because probate makes the will a matter of record. Splitting a phrase between relatives converts one point of failure into several, any of which can lose their fragment or combine early. Leaving instructions with a lawyer means trusting an individual with total, unauditable access for as long as you live. Doing nothing is the most common choice, and it is why an estimated fortune in bitcoin sits permanently unreachable.

The guides below work through the alternatives honestly, including where our own approach is the wrong tool. Three principles run through all of them, and they are worth stating before you read anything else. Never put a secret anywhere it will be read by people — a will, an email, a photo in cloud storage, a password manager whose recovery you have not tested. An inheritance plan that has never been rehearsed is a hypothesis, not a plan; the only way to know a beneficiary can recover your assets is to have them do it on a small amount while you are alive to fix what breaks. And the mechanism must survive your inattention, because whatever you set up has to keep working through years in which you change phones, wallets, jobs and countries without thinking about it once.

If you read only one thing here, make it the checklist below. It is deliberately secret-free — you can fill it in completely without writing down a single key — and it forces the two decisions everything else depends on: what you actually hold, and who is supposed to end up with it.