What happens to my crypto on Coinbase when I die?
GAP STATED
We tried to answer this directly a third time, across three separate research passes now (Q9, Q26, and this one), and Coinbase's deceased-account documentation remains genuinely
unreachable by every method available to us. Direct curl with a browser user agent returned an HTTP
403 (bot-protection challenge) on help.coinbase.com. A rendering fetch tool returned the same result.
A Wayback Machine lookup for the likely help-article URL returned no archived snapshot at all —
{"archived_snapshots": {}}, meaning even the Internet Archive has not captured a readable copy of
whatever page currently exists at that address.
We are publishing this as the answer rather than guessing, because it is itself useful information: if you hold crypto on Coinbase, you cannot assume it works like Kraken's (documented and quoted at Q26) or like a bank. Kraken specifically rejects funeral-home-issued death certificates and requires the official government-issued version; Coinbase's equivalent requirements — or whether it has a comparably formal process at all — are simply not something we, or apparently the Wayback Machine, have been able to independently confirm from Coinbase's own words across three attempts spread over more than a month.
If you hold crypto on Coinbase and are thinking about what your family would need to do, the only responsible advice is: contact Coinbase support directly and ask them to walk you through their current process, or have whoever is handling the estate do the same when the time comes — do not assume any other exchange's documented process (Kraken's, or any bank's) applies to Coinbase specifically. Separately, and more reliably within your own control: if any of your crypto sits in a self-custodied wallet rather than on an exchange (covered in Q9), none of this matters — there is no company to petition at all, and whoever has the seed phrase controls the funds regardless of what any exchange's policy says.
What we could not verify: Coinbase's actual documented deceased-account procedure. This is now confirmed unreachable across three independent research passes by three different methods (direct fetch, rendering fetch, Wayback Machine lookup) spanning early June through early August 2026. This is the single most persistent gap in the whole answer library.
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