Crypto inheritance planning: a plan you can finish this weekend

Most crypto inheritance advice is either "trust an exchange" or a cryptography seminar. This is neither: five concrete steps, one weekend, and about ten minutes a year of maintenance afterward.

By the Will & Key project team · Last verified 10 August 2026 · Updated 28 September 2026 · Editorial policy

Direct answer: a workable crypto inheritance plan has five parts: an asset inventory, a custody map, separate legal and technical instructions, a transfer mechanism, and a rehearsal. The inventory should help an heir discover assets without containing any private key, seed phrase, PIN or password.

Review status: technically reviewed by the Will & Key project team on 10 August 2026. No independent legal, tax or security reviewer has approved this guide.

Key takeaways

Separate the map of assets from the secrets that can spend them.
Design for both discovery failure and access failure.
Choose a mechanism your actual heir can operate, not the most sophisticated mechanism.
Test the full path with a small amount and review it after any material change.

Before you start: the two failure modes you're designing against

Every crypto estate fails one of two ways. Discovery failure: your family never finds the assets, or never learns they exist. Access failure: they find them but can't move them. A good plan attacks both, in that order — because the discovery failure is more common and cheaper to fix. (The full picture of what goes wrong is in what happens to your crypto when you die.)

Step 1 — Inventory (Saturday morning)

One page, plain language. Every place you hold crypto: chains, wallets, exchanges, DeFi positions, staked assets. For each: what it roughly is, and where the access instructions live — never the instructions themselves. The test for this page: if it blew out of a window onto the street, you'd shrug. If any line would make you sprint after it, that line doesn't belong on it.

Inventory field	Safe example	Never record here
Provider or wallet label	"Long-term Bitcoin wallet" or "Coinbase account"	Username, password or two-factor recovery codes
Asset and network	BTC on Bitcoin; ETH on Base	Private key or seed phrase
Public identifier	Public address or provider public account ID	PIN or passphrase
Instruction location	"Envelope B in home safe"	The contents of Envelope B
Review marker	Last checked 10 August 2026	False promises that values are current

Step 2 — Consolidate custody (Saturday afternoon)

Inheritance plans die of complexity. Eight wallets across four chains with three DeFi positions is a scavenger hunt for your heirs; two wallets is a plan.

Reduce the number of wallets, networks and protocols an heir must identify.
Keep long-term and day-to-day holdings distinct, with both represented in the inventory.
Document staked, bridged or protocol-held positions; simplify positions the heir cannot safely unwind.
Follow the chosen wallet manufacturer's current backup procedure and perform its supported recovery check.

A hardware wallet is not the inheritance plan by itself. Its backup may recreate every derived account, which makes that backup both the recovery tool and a master secret. Trezor says its wallet backup contains the information needed to recover the wallet; Ledger likewise says anyone with its recovery phrase can recreate the accounts. Keep vendor-neutral estate instructions and product-specific recovery instructions separate.

Step 3 — The letter (Saturday evening)

A sealed physical letter for your heir with exactly three contents: the inventory page, what to do first ("do nothing for a week; don't tell anyone outside the family; don't type anything into any website"), and who to ask for technical help — a named person you actually trust, not "someone at the computer shop." What the letter must never contain: seed phrases, PINs, passwords. A letter is paperwork, and paperwork leaks.

If you use an on-chain inactivity switch such as Will & Key, the inventory page should also give your heir everything they need to find and claim the vault, none of it secret: the chain, the vault contract address, your public wallet address and the vault number, which of their addresses you named, the app address, and your check-in period and horizon date. Say plainly that nobody will notify them when the time comes. Will & Key sends no alerts of any kind, so they will have to check for themselves.

The warning about not typing things into websites earns its sentence: bereaved families are a targeted scam demographic. Anyone who contacts your family offering "wallet recovery help" after a death is a predator, one hundred percent of the time.

Step 4 — The mechanism (Sunday)

Now the access problem. You have three serious options, and the right choice depends on who your heirs are:

Method	Best fit	What the heir must preserve or do	Main failure mode
Exchange estate process	Heir needs a conventional legal process	Discover account and produce current provider documents	Provider risk or undiscovered account
Multi-share backup	Family can safeguard physical shares	Locate the threshold and follow supported recovery steps	Too few valid shares survive
Multisig	Several capable, independent signers exist	Coordinate threshold signatures and wallet configuration	Signer or metadata loss
On-chain inactivity switch	Heir can use one wallet but should not hold today's spending key	Notice the expired deadline unprompted, initiate a claim, then finalize it after the challenge window	Missed owner check-ins, an heir who never checks, bad beneficiary address or contract defect
Full seed shared in advance	Rarely appropriate	Protect a secret that spends immediately	Premature compromise

These compose. A common adult pattern: hardware wallet + a Will & Key vault holding the long-term stack with a spouse as heir, checked in on quarterly; the hot wallet handled by the letter; the exchange account handled by the will.

Use the printable checklist before choosing a product. It gives you a secret-free inventory, mechanism decision record, rehearsal log and annual review page.

Download checklist (PDF)

Will & Key status: the contract live on Base is version 2, deployed on 28 September 2026. It contains the contract fixes from a preliminary audit of version 1 by AI auditing agents, performed at the project's request and not independent (a few findings were kept by design: see the known limits), and it has since been reviewed only by AI agents of the same kind that wrote it. It has not completed an independent third-party audit or a full minimum-duration Base Sepolia claim lifecycle. Review the security evidence and use only a small test amount.

Step 5 — The rehearsal (Sunday evening, 30 minutes)

Whatever you chose, run it once with your heir while you're alive. Send a token amount. Have them find the letter, follow it, and (for a dead man's switch) do a claim on a test vault so they've seen the screens they'll one day see alone. A rehearsed plan is a plan; an unrehearsed plan is a hope. This half hour is the highest-value part of the whole weekend.

The annual ten minutes

Re-read the inventory; update anything that moved.
Confirm your heir still controls the wallet you named — and still knows where the letter is.
If your mechanism has a horizon or timer settings, sanity-check they still fit your life.
Check that whatever reminds you to check in still works: your own calendar entry, not the product. Will & Key sends no alerts of any kind.

That's the whole discipline. Not a seminar — a weekend, then ten minutes a year, for the only asset class you own that has no undo button and no lost-and-found.

Worked example: a reviewable plan, not a pile of secrets

InventoryLists assets, networks and instruction locations.

Legal planNames recipients and executor under local law.

Recovery protocolStores secrets separately and defines access conditions.

RehearsalUses a small amount and records what failed.

ReviewRuns annually and after wallet, heir or jurisdiction changes.