What happens to crypto I hold on Coinbase or Kraken when I die?
This directly answers what our first batch (Q9) explicitly flagged as unverified: at the time, both Coinbase's and Kraken's deceased-account pages returned bot-protection pages to every fetch attempt. This pass got through to Kraken's.
Kraken runs a documented "Deceased Client Account Claims" process. Per Kraken's own support article: "While Kraken doesn't currently offer the option to add a beneficiary to an account, we do have a process to support families and legal representatives." The required documents are specific and stricter than most platforms in this set: "Death Certificate: Complete color image of the official document. Note that certificates issued by funeral homes are not accepted," plus "Legal Documentation" confirming appointment as legal representative (probate or letters of administration), a color photo ID of that representative, and a signed, dated letter from the representative confirming the death and their role. Kraken's Compliance team reviews the claim once submitted, and states "additional documents may be required." Source
The funeral-home-certificate exclusion is a genuinely useful, specific detail: a family that gets a short-form or funeral-home-issued death certificate (common, and often the first document families obtain) may need to separately request the official government-issued long-form certificate before Kraken will act.
Coinbase's equivalent page remains unverifiable in this research pass — it returned a
bot-protection challenge to every automated fetch attempt (curl with a browser user agent, and a
rendering fetch tool), the same result our first batch got. We are not describing Coinbase's process
because we could not read it ourselves. If you hold crypto on Coinbase, check
help.coinbase.com directly or contact their support rather than assuming Kraken's process applies.
What we could not verify: Coinbase's actual documented procedure — genuinely unresolved across two separate research passes now.
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