A serious concern: people die, accounts are lost — is there any way to “inherit”

[drgomez89]

Hi everyone,
I’d like to raise a serious and often overlooked issue.
People pass away, and when that happens, accounts, wallets, and digital assets can be permanently lost. Unlike traditional banking systems, in crypto there is often no clear mechanism for inheritance.
This makes me wonder:
Is there any app, service, or protocol designed to securely handle crypto inheritance?
Are there practical solutions people are currently using (multi-sig, trusted third parties, legal setups, smart contracts)?
How do you balance security while alive with access for heirs in case something happens?
I’m not asking for private details or instructions — just looking for general ideas, tools, or experiences that people are comfortable sharing.
This feels like a real problem as adoption grows, and I’m curious how the community is approaching it.
Looking forward to your thoughts.

[Stalker22]

Personally, I like practical solutions.  For instance, a solution that uses a metal plate backup of your seedphrase with instructions on how to recover the wallet stored at the same location or with a memory that is stored somewhere safe, such as in a bank safe deposit box.  Finally, the last thing I would want to add is to let anyone know in your testament that you hold one or more crypto assets, but you should not include any information that may expose yourself to a potential data breach or loss of your private key(s).

[flapduck]

If you want to get fancy without getting stupid, multisig is the clean middle ground. Nobody can unilaterally run off with it, but your heirs aren't stuck needing a dead person's password either.

The best setups I've seen discussed here are the ones where keys are split across places and/or people that don't fail the same way (family + lawyer/executor + your own backup), and where you actually do a dry-run once so you don't discover the "instructions" are missing one tiny detail that bricks the whole thing.

[Itz-prisigold]

This is one of those things that everyone tends to ignore until it hits home. Everyone worries about hacks. But personally, I think there is a lot more crypto lost due to owners being gone and no one knows what to do next.

This, to me, is the downside of having full control. Cryptocurrencies don't have a built in next of kin kind of deal. If a person doesn't make those types of arrangements in advance, their life savings could be locked up forever. That is a powerful system, but also scary. 

I also don't think there is any way to solve the problem that is magic, either. Giving one person you can really trust can be risky too. If you over complicate the system, your family members will just get confused and they'll not know what to do. A system that is straightforward and easy to understand is over better than one that is complicated. 

I think that as more people begin to participate in crypto, more people will begin to ask questions about lost crypto. What will happens to your crypto when you die? Everyone seems to understand the value of the assets, but if those assets become worthless if something happens to the person who owns them, that is a satisfactory value.