What happens to your bitcoin when you die?

When someone dies, their bank account doesn’t disappear: the bank follows a legal process and pays the heirs. Bitcoin in a wallet only you control has no bank. It moves only with a signature from the right private key, and the network has no way of knowing that its owner has died. If no one else can produce that signature, the coins stay where they are, visible to anyone and spendable by no one.

So what your family can reach depends on two things you settle while you’re alive: where the keys are, and who can use them. A court can decide who inherits the coins. No court can sign for them.

What the law can and can’t do

The law has been catching up with digital money. Two examples:

In England and Wales, the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act became law in December 2025. It confirms that things like crypto tokens can be owned as personal property, which, as the government pointed out, means they can be part of a person’s estate.
In the United States, nearly every state has adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, a model law written by the Uniform Law Commission in 2015. It gives an executor authority over a dead person’s digital assets, a crypto account included. The companies that hold them, which the law calls custodians, must respond to a request that comes with the death certificate and a certified copy of the document appointing the executor, and the executor has the right to get into the dead person’s own devices and whatever is stored on them. Where a company offers its own tool for choosing who gets access, what the user chose there overrides the will.

Neither law can produce a key. A right to open a wallet is no use without its PIN or its words, and for coins that only the owner could move, there’s no company to send the papers to. The law can say whose they are; only the key can move them.

On an exchange

An exchange holds the coins for its customers, so your heirs deal with a company, much as they would with a bank. Kraken, for example, asks for:

a full color image of the official death certificate (one issued by a funeral home isn’t accepted);
the document appointing whoever represents the estate, such as a grant of probate or letters of administration;
that person’s photo ID;
a letter, signed and dated by them, confirming the death.

It may ask for more, it doesn’t say how long its review takes, and it doesn’t currently let customers name a beneficiary in advance. The legal papers come first, and they take time of their own: in England and Wales, the executor has to estimate what the estate is worth before applying for probate, and the government says the grant usually comes within 12 weeks of the application.

The process starts when someone files a claim, so it works only if someone knows the account exists. Until then, the coins are a promise on the company’s books, and the guide on custody tells what happened when exchanges broke theirs.

In a single-key wallet

Your heirs need what you needed: the device and its PIN, or the seed phrase. If you were the only one who knew where those were, the money is gone.

In February 2018, Bloomberg told the story of a father who had spent three years looking for the bitcoin his son had mined on his home computer. The son had been killed five years earlier, at 26, when the two-seater plane he was in crashed. The father knew the coins existed, but not how many there were or how to find them, and without the keys to the wallet, hosted by Blockchain.info, he had no way of reaching any of it.

The opposite failure is just as final. If someone does find the words, nothing checks that they’re the heir: whoever has them can move the money, whatever the will says, and a bitcoin transaction can’t be reversed.

Some phone wallets don’t show you words at all: they keep the key in your Apple or Google account, as the guide on losing your phone explains. That account has its own rules when you die. Apple lets you name a Legacy Contact: after your death, with an access key you generate for them and your death certificate, they can reach your photos, messages and files, but not, in Apple’s words, “data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys)”. Google says that when it deals with a deceased person’s account, it can’t provide passwords or other login details. A key that lives only there may die with the account.

In a wallet with several keys

A multisig wallet needs more than one key to move the money, which makes room for an heir without handing anyone the money early. A common arrangement has three keys, any two of which can sign: yours, a backup kept somewhere else, and a third held by someone else, such as a company that co-signs. While you’re alive, no single key moves anything. After your death, whoever you’ve chosen can reach the backup key and, with the third keyholder’s signature, move the money.

When the third key belongs to a company, it’s collaborative custody, and what counts is what’s agreed in advance: what your heir has to show before the company signs, how long it waits, and how your heir moves the money if the company is gone by then.

Bitcoin can also put a path behind a clock. A wallet’s script can say that a recovery key works only once the coins have sat unmoved for a set time, up to 65,535 blocks, about 15 months at the usual pace of one block every ten minutes. The standard that defined this lock gives its own example: a wallet shared by three people, in which any two can sign at any time, and one of them alone after 30 days. As long as the owner moves the coins now and then, the clock starts over. If they stop, the path opens, with no company or court involved.

That has two costs. Each restart is a transaction, with its network fee. And the clock can’t tell why the coins stopped moving: if you forget, the path opens while you’re alive, so its key belongs with someone you’d trust with the money then too.

Whatever the arrangement, your heirs need the wallet’s configuration as well as the keys, because with the keys alone a wallet can’t always find the addresses it used. The guide on hardware wallets, multisig and collaborative custody explains why.

Side by side

	On an exchange	In a single-key wallet	In a multisig wallet with a path for heirs
What your heirs need	To know the account exists, and the estate’s papers	The device and its PIN, or the seed phrase	The key and the steps you left them, and a second signature or the end of a wait
Who checks they’re the heirs	The exchange, against the estate’s papers	No one: whoever has the key has the money	The co-signer, on terms agreed in advance; with a time lock, no one
While you’re alive	The exchange holds the money	Whoever finds the key can take it	No single key can move it
What can go wrong	No one knows the account exists, or the exchange fails	The key is never found, or the wrong person finds it	The configuration is lost, or no one ever tested the setup
How long it takes	Probate, then the exchange’s review	As long as finding the key takes, or forever	As soon as two keys sign, or once the lock runs out

Common mistakes

The seed phrase in the will. A will can become public. In England and Wales, once probate is granted the will becomes a public record, and a copy can be ordered online for 16 pounds. In the United States, probate court records are generally public, though the rules vary from state to state. The will can say that the bitcoin exists and who should receive it; the words belong somewhere else.
One person who knows everything. If only one other person knows where it all is, they become a single point of failure, and a target.
Instructions no one can follow. “It’s on the device in the safe” doesn’t help someone who has never used a wallet. Write the steps for a person who knows nothing about bitcoin.
Assuming the will decides. In many countries, part of an estate is reserved by law for children or a spouse, whatever the will says. In France, someone with one child can leave as they wish only half of what they own, and with three or more children only a quarter. Under Spain’s Civil Code, two thirds are reserved for children and other descendants; in Catalonia, which has its own civil code, their share is a quarter. The arrangements for the keys work better when they match what the law will do with everything else.

What a plan needs

An inventory. What you hold, where, and in which wallets, with no secrets in it, kept where your executor will look.
Instructions. How to reach each one, step by step, for someone who has never done it.
Keys arranged for both cases. No single person can take the money while you’re alive, and no single loss locks your heirs out afterwards.
The legal side. A will, or whatever takes its place where you live, saying the same thing as the keys.
A test. Walk someone through it with a small amount, and do it again whenever something changes.

The same plan covers a case people forget: being alive but unable to act, after an accident or during an illness. The American law above gives the same authority to an agent under a power of attorney or a court-appointed conservator, with the same limit: authority isn’t a key. For a wallet only you could open, the person you’ve chosen needs what your heirs would: the key, and the steps.

What to do

Write the inventory now. It costs nothing, and every route depends on it: no one claims an account they don’t know about, or looks for a key they’ve never heard of.
For money you spend, a wallet on your phone is fine. Keep in it what you’d carry in cash, and assume it may not outlive you, above all if its key lives only in your Apple or Google account.
For savings you want to pass on, a multisig arrangement with a path for heirs, in which no one can take the money alone while you’re alive. Collaborative custody that passes the test in the hardware wallet guide gives you one without looking after every key yourself, as long as your heirs’ path is agreed in advance, including what they’d do if the company were gone.
A single-key wallet doesn’t suit savings you want to pass on: one lost key leaves your heirs with nothing, and one found key hands everything to whoever found it.
An exchange is a route your heirs can follow without any key, as long as they know the account exists. Until they claim it, the money is a promise on the company’s books.

Whatever you choose, make the will and the keys say the same thing, and go over the plan once a year and after any change: a new wallet, a new device, a death or a birth in the family.