What happens to your passwords and crypto when you die — and how to prepare

Most people have dozens of online accounts, a password manager, family photos in the cloud, and maybe a crypto wallet — and no plan for any of it if they die or become incapacitated. Unlike a bank account, there is no next-of-kin process for your Bitcoin or your password vault. Without preparation, your accounts get locked at the worst possible time, important files become unreachable, and anything held in a self-custody crypto wallet can be lost permanently. This guide covers what really happens, your options, and where a dead man's switch fits in.

Digital assets don't transfer automatically

The things protecting your accounts — passwords, two-factor codes, a hardware wallet's seed phrase — exist only with you. That's exactly what keeps them secure, and exactly what makes them hard to pass on:

• Online accounts lock on inactivity or death. Recovering them usually requires death certificates, a legal process, and the provider's cooperation — and for end-to-end-encrypted data, often isn't possible at all.
• Self-custody crypto is unforgiving. If no one has your seed phrase, there is no reset, no support line, and no recovery. The coins are simply gone. A large share of all lost Bitcoin was lost this way.
• Incapacity, not just death. A stroke or an accident can lock you out of your own life while you're still here — and most "when I die" plans don't cover that.

Your options, and their trade-offs

• Share your credentials now. Simplest, but you're trusting someone with full access today, and it breaks the moment you change a password.
• Put it in your will. Wills go through probate — slow (often months) and public — and you should never write a password or seed phrase into a legal document that other people will read.
• Password-manager emergency access. Some managers offer legacy or emergency access with a waiting period. Useful for that one vault, but tied to a single provider and usually doesn't cover a hardware-wallet seed or anything outside the manager.
• A dead man's switch. A service that releases access to a person you choose only if you stop responding — so you give nothing away while you're active, and there's a built-in window to stop a false alarm.

What a good digital inheritance plan includes

• Choose a digital executor — one or two people you trust completely.
• Note where things are (which accounts, which wallet, which devices) — without writing down the secrets themselves.
• Use a release method that doesn't require handing over secrets today.
• Make sure it triggers on incapacity, not only death.
• Keep it updatable and revocable as your accounts change.

How deadkey.net handles it

deadkey.net is a zero-knowledge dead man's switch built for exactly this. You protect a secret you already have — a password, a PIN, or a crypto seed phrase — by splitting it against a one-time codebook. Our servers only ever store encrypted coordinates they cannot read; the codebook that decodes them lives on paper, with the person you choose.

If that person ever believes you've died or become incapacitated, they start a 10-day countdown. You're notified immediately and can cancel with one tap. If you don't, they can retrieve the secret — decoded entirely on their side. We never see your secret, there's no account to create, and it's a flat $3. For crypto specifically, the seed-phrase mode is designed so your words never touch a computer.

Want the details? See how the security model works or the FAQ.

Common questions

Isn't it risky to trust one person?

A trusted person can only start the countdown — they can't reach your secret without it running its full 10 days, and you're warned the moment it begins and can cancel instantly. Pick someone you'd trust with the outcome anyway.

What about my crypto seed phrase?

deadkey has a dedicated seed-phrase mode for 12- or 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrases, built tin-foil-hat-only so the words never get typed into a computer.

Does this replace a will?

No — think of it as the access layer, not legal estate planning. Use a will for who inherits your assets, and a mechanism like this for the credentials and keys those assets actually depend on.