What Happens to Your Crypto When You Die?

Here's a number that should bother you: an estimated 3.7 million Bitcoin are permanently lost — roughly 20% of all Bitcoin ever mined. Some of that is early mining from forgotten hard drives. But an increasing share is from people who passed away without leaving their families a way to access their wallets.

If you hold crypto, you've probably spent time securing it. Hardware wallets, seed phrases stored offline, multi-sig setups. Good. But here's the question most people skip: what happens to all of that when you're not around?

The Problem Isn't Security — It's Succession

Traditional estate planning wasn't built for digital assets. Your attorney knows how to handle a house, a brokerage account, a life insurance policy. But a Ledger Nano in a safe deposit box with no instructions? That's a dead end.

Even if you've written down your seed phrase (and you should), your family needs to know:

• That the wallet exists in the first place
• Where the seed phrase is stored
• Which wallets hold which assets
• How to actually access and transfer those assets
• The tax implications of what they're inheriting

A sticky note in a drawer isn't a succession plan. Neither is "my son knows about crypto."

What You Can Do Right Now

You don't need any special technology to start. What you need is a secure, organized record of what you own and who should get it.

That means:

1. Inventory every wallet and exchange account. List the asset, the platform, the approximate value, and where access credentials are stored.
2. Assign beneficiaries. Who gets each asset? What percentage? Are there conditions?
3. Store it securely. Not in a Google Doc. Not in your email drafts. Somewhere encrypted, with controlled access.
4. Tell someone it exists. Your executor, your attorney, your spouse. At least one trusted person needs to know there's a plan — and where to find it.

Where Legacy on Chain Fits

This is exactly what we built Legacy on Chain to solve. It's a secure vault where you can record every asset — crypto, real estate, insurance, investments — assign beneficiaries, upload supporting documents, and keep everything organized in one place.

Your family doesn't need any technical knowledge. They just need access to a dashboard that tells them clearly: here's what exists, here's who it's for, and here are the documents that prove it.

We're in beta right now, and it's free to sign up. If you've been meaning to get your digital estate in order, this is a good place to start.