What happens to your crypto when you die? For most people, the answer is simple and devastating: it’s gone forever.
An estimated $120 billion in Bitcoin alone is permanently lost, and a significant portion of that belongs to people who died without passing on their private keys. Unlike a bank account, there’s no beneficiary designation for a crypto wallet. There’s no court order that can recover a private key. There’s no customer service number to call.
Why Crypto Is Different
When you die with a traditional bank account, your family contacts the bank, provides a death certificate, and eventually gains access through probate. It’s slow and expensive, but it works.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t work like that. A crypto wallet is controlled by a private key — a long string of characters that proves ownership. If nobody has that key, the funds are inaccessible. Not frozen. Not locked. Gone. The blockchain doesn’t have a “forgot my password” feature, and no government or company can override it.
This is the fundamental tradeoff of self-custody: you control your assets completely, but that control dies with you.
Current Solutions and Why They Fail
Seed phrase in a safe deposit box. Your family finds a piece of paper with 24 words on it. Do they know what to do with it? Do they know which wallet software to use? Which network your tokens are on? One wrong move and they could lose everything attempting to recover it.
Sharing keys with a lawyer. Most lawyers don’t understand cryptocurrency. Even if they do, sharing your private key with a third party defeats the purpose of self-custody. And what if the lawyer’s office is breached?
Coinbase legacy contact. This only works for assets held on Coinbase. If you use a hardware wallet, DeFi protocols, or multiple exchanges, a single platform’s legacy feature covers a fraction of your holdings.
Password manager emergency access. Better than nothing, but emergency access in most password managers is an afterthought. It typically grants all-or-nothing access with no per-beneficiary control, no automated trigger, and no support for the non-technical grieving person who actually needs to use it.
How DeadSwitch Solves This
DeadSwitch was built specifically for this problem. Here’s how it works:
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Store your crypto information in an encrypted vault on a USB drive — wallet addresses, seed phrases, private keys, exchange credentials, hardware wallet PINs, and recovery instructions.
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Assign items to specific beneficiaries. Your spouse gets the exchange accounts. Your tech-savvy sibling gets the DeFi wallet. Each person gets only what you assign to them.
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The dead man’s switch detects your absence. Configurable check-in intervals (7, 14, or 30 days). Miss enough check-ins, and after a grace period, the system delivers each beneficiary’s decryption key automatically.
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Beneficiaries get clear instructions. When the switch triggers, each person receives a compassionate email with their unique access code and step-by-step instructions designed for non-technical users.
The vault is encrypted with AES-256-GCM-SIV and lives on a physical USB drive — not in the cloud. Our servers never see your vault contents. Even in a worst-case server breach, your crypto keys remain safe on the USB.
Don’t Wait
Every day you hold crypto without a digital estate plan, you’re gambling that nothing will happen to you. The average age of a crypto holder is getting younger, but accidents and illness don’t check your birthday.
Your family shouldn’t have to figure this out while they’re grieving. Set it up once, check in periodically, and know that your digital assets will reach the right people.