Can Someone Access Your Crypto Wallet If You Die Without a Plan?

In most cases, no — and that’s the single biggest risk in digital estate planning right now.

Self-custody wallets (where you hold your own private keys or seed phrase) have no customer service line, no password reset, and no next-of-kin process. If no one has the key or seed phrase, the funds are permanently and irreversibly lost — there is no fallback.

Exchange-held crypto (Coinbase, Kraken, etc.) has more of a path forward. Exchanges have an estate/deceased-user process similar to a bank, but it requires documentation, and — critically — it requires your executor to know the account exists in the first place.

What to do about it:

•Document that a wallet exists and which exchange or wallet software it uses — without writing the seed phrase in the same place

•Store seed phrases securely offline, separate from your general estate documents

•Make sure your executor or digital executor knows crypto is part of your estate, even if they never see the keys until needed