In short
These tools hand information to a named person after a wait, a death certificate or a period of silence. They’re good for the first two layers of your plan: what exists and how to get in. They’re a poor place for the seed phrase itself, because every one of them adds a company, a server or a timer between your heirs and the coins. Use them to point, not to hold.
Password managers
Most people’s crypto trail starts in a password manager: exchange logins, the email account, notes on where things are. Whether a named person can get in after your death depends on the product.
- Bitwarden has Emergency Access on its paid plans. You name a trusted contact; after your death they request access, and if you don’t reject the request within a waiting time you set, they get in. Two levels exist: view only, or “takeover”, which lets them set a new master password (Bitwarden). The waiting time is the safeguard against a contact who jumps the gun.
- 1Password has no equivalent. A 1Password employee, asked about legacy access in 2025, said there had been “no movement on this subject, that I am aware of” (1Password community). What exists is the Emergency Kit, a printable sheet with your sign-in details and a space for the master password. Store it with your other secrets; a family organiser can’t see your vault for you.
- Others, such as Proton Pass and NordPass, offer emergency access with a waiting period of their own. Check the current rules of whatever you use.
Whatever the product, a password manager is a sensible place for account passwords and a terrible place for seed phrases: it’s online, it syncs, and takeover access gives the contact everything at once.
Apple and Google
- Apple Legacy Contact. You name a contact in your Apple Account settings and give them an access key. After your death they need “both the access key and your death certificate” to request access (Apple). They get photos, notes, mail, files and backups. They do not get the passwords stored in iCloud Keychain, nor payment details (Apple). So an heir with legacy access can read the note that says “crypto is on Kraken”, but not the Kraken password, which doesn’t matter: heirs claim through the estate anyway.
- Google Inactive Account Manager. You choose a period of inactivity (3, 6, 12 or 18 months), up to ten people to notify, and what they may download. Google warns you a month before the deadline, and the people you named have three months to download the data (Google). Useful for email, Drive and photos; set it up at myaccount.google.com/inactive.
- Microsoft has no equivalent. Without your password, relatives need a court order, and even then Microsoft says it is “generally unable to provide information to non-account holders” (Microsoft). Germany is the exception: heirs there can ask support directly with a death certificate and an Erbschein.
Email matters more than it looks: it’s where password resets for everything else arrive. Make sure your executor can get into it, through one of these tools or through the password manager.
Crypto dead man’s switches
A dead man’s switch releases something when you stop checking in. For crypto the idea is attractive: no lawyer, no envelope, the seed reaches your heir automatically. The products differ in what they actually hold.
- Key-in-a-vault services. Casa gives your heir a key of your multisig; Bitkey hands them an encrypted copy of your phone key that only unlocks after the wait. Both run a six-month notice period during which you can cancel the claim, and neither company holds enough keys to spend on its own.
- Share-holder services. Vault12 splits your seed into shares held by guardians you choose; the shares are combined for your heir. Inheriti does something similar with encrypted shares and a timer on a blockchain. Sarcophagus is a dead man’s switch built into a smart contract: a file you encrypt is released if you stop renewing.
- Timed messages. Services such as deadmansswitch.net send an email you wrote if you don’t respond to reminders. Fine for a letter that says where things are; disastrous for a letter that contains the words themselves, because email isn’t private.
Three ways a switch fails
- The company disappears. Several crypto inheritance start-ups from the 2017 to 2019 wave are dormant; DigiPulse’s site, for one, hasn’t been updated since 2018. A switch that depends on a server nobody maintains never fires.
- It fires while you’re alive. A long hospital stay, a lost phone, a holiday without signal. The design has to let you cancel, and your heir has to be someone who’d call you first.
- It fires into the wrong hands. Whatever it releases, it releases to an email address or a device. If that’s a full seed phrase, the switch has turned your heir’s inbox into the wallet.
How to use them well
- Put the map in these tools: the inventory, the letter, where the secrets are. Keep the secrets on metal and paper, in the places described in where to keep seed phrases.
- Prefer tools where the company can’t act alone: a multisig key or a share, not a copy of the whole seed.
- Name a person, not just an address. A dead man’s switch that emails an account nobody checks has done nothing.
- Write each tool on the inventory, with the waiting period, so your executor knows what will arrive and when.
- Test the cancel path once, so you know what a false alarm looks like.
Next: Putting crypto in a trust.