What happens to my crypto if I die?

This splits cleanly into two very different situations, and almost every general "digital legacy" answer glosses over the difference.

If your crypto is self-custodied — a hardware wallet, a software wallet, or just a seed phrase written down — there is no company involved at all. Whoever has the seed phrase or private key controls the funds; there is no support line, no death certificate process, no "forgot password" flow, because there is no central party who could reset anything. Bitcoin.org's own educational page states this in the plainest possible terms: "Your bitcoins can be lost forever if you don't have a backup plan for your peers and family. If the location of your wallets or your passwords are not known by anyone when you are gone, there is no hope that your funds will ever be recovered." Source This is not a policy choice any company could change even if it wanted to — it's how public-key cryptography works. If nobody you trust knows where your seed phrase is, or how to use it, self-custodied crypto is permanently lost the moment you are, regardless of what your will says.

If your crypto sits on a custodial exchange (Coinbase, Kraken, etc.) instead, the situation is structurally more like a brokerage account: the exchange, not you, holds the keys, so in principle an estate can request access the same way it would for a bank account — with a death certificate and court-issued letters of administration. However, we could not verify the specific procedure of any individual exchange in this research pass: both Coinbase's and Kraken's deceased-account documentation returned bot-protection pages (Cloudflare challenge / no retrievable content) to every automated fetch attempt, so we are not citing a specific exchange's process here. If you hold crypto on an exchange, check that exchange's own current support documentation directly, or contact their support, rather than assuming it works like your bank.

What we could not verify: any specific exchange's actual documented death/estate-access procedure. Treat this as an open item requiring a manual check per exchange.

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