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 team · Updated August 2026

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.

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.

• Move long-term holdings to one hardware wallet (Ledger and Trezor are both fine; buy only from the manufacturer, never second-hand).
• Keep a small hot wallet for activity, and treat it as expendable.
• Unwind the clever stuff. A yield position your heir must understand to withdraw is, for inheritance purposes, already lost. If you wouldn't leave your family a margin account, don't leave them a leveraged farm.

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.

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:

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.

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 your reminders still reach you (email changed? phone changed?).

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.