Passing on crypto and passwords
If you hold your own keys, nobody can reach your coins without them. That is the point of self-custody, and it is also the problem: your family may know the coins exist and still have no way to get at them.
Why the obvious fixes do not work
Three things people try, and what each costs.
- Give someone the seed today. They can take everything immediately, and you have to trust them completely from that moment on.
- Leave it with a lawyer or in a will. It gets read by people who should not have it, and often years before it is needed.
- Write it down and hope. The note is either findable, which means it is findable by anyone, or it is hidden well enough that your family never locates it.
A check-in service avoids all three. Nothing is revealed until you stop checking in.
Never put the seed phrase in the letter
Letters here are stored so they can be delivered, and they are protected by access control rather than by encryption. That means the service itself could read them, and email is not a safe place for a seed phrase in any case. Treat what you write as instructions, not as a key.
Three ways to do that, from simplest to strongest.
- Instructions only. Keep the backup where it already is, on paper or steel in a safe. Your letter says where it is, which wallet to use, roughly what is there, and who to ask for help with the restore. Anyone reading the letter gets nothing without the physical backup.
- Seed at home, passphrase in the letter. If your wallet uses a passphrase, sometimes called the 25th word, the seed alone opens a different and empty wallet. Keep the seed at home and put only the passphrase in the letter. Neither half is useful on its own.
- Put the file in the vault. Vault files reach the recipient through the same time-limited link as the letter, and only after release. A recovery note stored as a file is not in the email and not in the letter body.
Multisig works the same way. The letter tells your heirs which keys they already hold, where the others are, and how to combine them. It never needs to contain a key itself.
What to actually write
Assume the reader is grieving and does not know much about crypto. Write for them, not for you.
- What you own and roughly how much, so they know what they are looking for and whether it matters.
- Where the backup is, and which wallet software or hardware wallet to use with it.
- Someone technical you trust, by name, who they can call.
- A warning that nobody legitimate will ever ask them for the seed phrase, and that anyone who contacts them offering a recovery service is almost certainly running a scam.
- An easy first step, such as checking a public address balance, so they can confirm something is there before doing anything irreversible.
The same applies to passwords
A password manager that nobody else can open is the same problem in a different shape. The master password is the key, and if only you know it, the whole vault is lost at the same moment you are.
The same three tiers apply. Point at where the master password is written down. Split it, so the first half is somewhere they can reach and the second half arrives with the letter. Or put a recovery note in the vault. What you must not do is paste the master password into the letter.
Setting it up here
- Write the letter or the notes, and attach any recovery file to the vault.
- Add the people who should receive it.
- Pick a long interval. Months of silence cost you nothing, and a false release is the one outcome you do not want here.
- Arm it, and turn on a second notification channel so a missed email is not the end of the story.
One thing worth knowing: what you are doing here is passing on instructions, not transferring ownership. Whether crypto forms part of your estate, and what tax applies where you live, is a question for a qualified adviser. This service is not a lawyer and does not give legal or financial advice.
Last updated: 2026-10-19