AmberKeyWhat happens to your crypto when you die?
Almost every other account you own is recoverable. Forget a bank password and the bank resets it. Lose access to your email and there’s a support line, a verification form, a human somewhere. Crypto is the exception, and it’s the exception in the most permanent way possible: for a self-custody wallet, if the key is gone, the money is gone. Not frozen. Not tied up in paperwork. Gone, mathematically, forever.
That’s not a rare edge case. A meaningful slice of all the Bitcoin ever mined is already unreachable, sitting in wallets whose owners lost the keys or died without passing them on. If you hold crypto, “what happens when I die” is not a philosophical question. It’s the difference between your family inheriting real value and inheriting a number they can see but never touch.
The catch is that crypto isn’t one problem. It’s two, and most people have both.
Problem one: the wallet you control yourself
A self-custody wallet, hardware or software, is secured by a seed phrase: usually twelve or twenty-four words. Those words are the wallet. Whoever has them controls the funds, and nobody else can help. There is no company, no reset, no court that can recover a seed phrase that wasn’t written down or was written down and lost. This is the whole point of self-custody, and it’s also its whole danger.
So the seed phrase creates a genuinely hard problem, because it has two failure modes that pull in opposite directions:
- Tell no one, and it dies with you. If the words only ever lived in your head, or on a scrap of paper nobody can find, your family inherits nothing.
- Write it somewhere findable, and it’s stolen today. A seed phrase in a desk drawer, a note in your phone, or a photo in your cloud is readable right now, by anyone who comes across it, while you’re alive and well. Crypto theft is irreversible too.
The needle you have to thread is a copy that the right people can reach after you’re gone, and that nobody, including you, is exposed by before then. That is a real design problem, and “just write it down safely” is not a solution to it.
Problem two: the exchange that controls it for you
If your crypto lives on an exchange like Coinbase, you don’t hold the keys; the exchange does. That means there is a process when you die, but it’s a full estate process, not a login handoff.
Coinbase spells out what it takes to claim a deceased person’s account. The estate has to provide a certified death certificate, probate documents (Letters Testamentary, Letters of Administration, an Affidavit for Collection, or a Small Estate Affidavit, depending on the estate), a government photo ID of the people named in those probate documents, and a signed letter directing Coinbase to transfer the assets to a specified account. The executor then works through Coinbase’s Executor Services form, submits the documentation, and waits for verification. Coinbase transfers the assets to the estate. It does not hand over the deceased’s own login.
Two things in that policy matter for planning. First, Coinbase says plainly that it does not support naming a beneficiary on individual accounts, so there is no “transfer on death” shortcut; your will or your state’s intestacy law decides who gets it. Second, none of this is fast. Document verification and transfers at a financial institution take weeks in the smooth cases, longer when there are multiple heirs or any court complexity.
And there’s a risk that sits above all of that: the exchange itself. An account on someone else’s platform can be frozen, locked during an outage, or caught up in the company’s own failure. The last few years gave the crypto world FTX and Celsius as reminders that “my crypto is on an exchange” and “my crypto is safe” are not the same sentence. The old saying exists for a reason: not your keys, not your coins.
The plan that actually works
Crypto needs a real plan, and the plan is different for each of the two problems.
For self-custody, escrow the seed the right way. The goal is a copy your chosen people can reach only after you’re gone, split so that no single person, and no single stolen scrap of paper, is enough on its own. A note in a safe is better than nothing, but it’s still one object one burglar can take. The stronger approach splits the secret across several people or places, so recovery needs a group acting together, not a single point that can fail or be robbed.
For exchange holdings, cover the login and point to the process. Leave the account credentials and a note on how to pass its two-factor check somewhere safe, and leave a second note telling your executor that Coinbase (or whichever exchange) has an Executor Services path and what it will ask for. While you’re at it, consider whether long-term holdings really belong on an exchange at all, or whether they’d be safer in self-custody you actually control, with a proper succession plan around the seed.
And write down that any of it exists. The quietest way crypto is lost is that nobody knew to look. An executor who has never heard the words “hardware wallet” will not go hunting for one. A one-line map, “there is a Ledger in the safe and a Coinbase account under this email,” is often the single most valuable thing you can leave.
Where AmberKey fits
The hardest part of all of this is the self-custody seed: reachable later, safe now, and not resting on one fragile point. That is close to the exact problem AmberKey was built to solve.
Your seed phrase goes into an encrypted vault whose key is split across the people you choose. No single person can open it. It releases only after you’ve stopped checking in and a waiting period has passed, during which one tap from you calls the whole thing off. Our servers hold only ciphertext, so by design we can never read it, and the recovery works with open formats and an offline tool even if our company is gone. For the exchange side, the same plan holds your login and the note that tells your executor where to start.
You can build the whole thing and print your kit for free. But whether you use AmberKey or a well-guarded piece of paper, make the plan. Crypto is the one asset that gives your family no second chances, and the work to protect it is an afternoon now instead of a permanent loss later.
This is general information, not legal or financial advice. For wills, trusts, and how crypto passes under your state’s law, talk to a licensed estate attorney.
AmberKey is a two-layer plan for your digital estate: a plain-language packet for your executor and an encrypted vault only your chosen circle can open, a design where our servers can never read your vault. See how it works →