Agreeing a plan with your family
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 5 min
In short
Tell your family nothing and your assets vanish with you. Tell them everything and you have created a new leak path. The workable line is to share what exists and where to look, while keeping the keys themselves under separate control.
Key points
- What is worth sharing is that assets exist, and where the material is kept
- Routinely sharing the phrase itself widens both the leak and the loss surface
- Exchange accounts can often be handled through the operator's own process
- Who you tell, and how much, is a judgement about trust
Definition
Deciding in advance how much to tell trusted family members about the existence and location of your assets, in case you cannot act yourself.
A self-custody wallet has no support desk. If the only person who knows something is you, and that knowledge is lost, the assets sit there untouchable — wallets left unopened after a death are not rare. But telling your family everything is not safe either: every additional person who knows is another path to an accident or a leak. So you design the scope of what you share.
Three things are worth sharing. First, that you hold crypto at all. Second, the shape of it: which exchanges you have accounts with, how many self-custody wallets exist. Third, where the relevant material is — which documents or which storage location to look at. None of this requires handing over a key. Keep the note describing the location separate from the key itself.
Exchange accounts and self-custody wallets differ. Because an exchange is a regulated business, it usually has a documented process for inheritance or incapacity, and family members can claim through it with the required paperwork. What they need from you is simply which exchanges hold accounts. A self-custody wallet, by contrast, cannot be restored unless someone can reach the seed phrase — and that is where the design work sits.
There are workable approaches: keep the medium holding the phrase in a physical place only a trusted person can access, such as a safe deposit box, and tell the family that it exists and how the process works; use a multi-signature arrangement requiring several parties, with one key held by a family member; or combine this with a professional or formal legal instrument. Whichever you choose, do not transmit a seed phrase by chat, email or cloud storage. And test, while you are well, that the procedure you designed actually works.
Watch out for
- · Never send a seed phrase to family by chat, email or cloud storage
- · Decide who to tell on the basis of complete trust, not convenience
- · A procedure too elaborate to execute is a procedure nobody will execute — favour feasibility
Frequently asked questions
My family knows nothing about crypto. Where do I start?
Before any technical explanation, tell them that the assets exist and who to consult if something happens. A single sheet of paper saying that exchange accounts go through the operator's own process, and that a self-custody wallet may need professional help, already does most of the work.