Seed phrases run from 12 to 24 words. Those words rebuild every private key in a cryptocurrency wallet, so whoever holds the list holds the coins.
A wallet you keep yourself is called self-custody, and it has no recovery path of any kind. No issuer stands behind it. Without the private key the funds sit on the public ledger for good, there for anyone to see and spendable by nobody. Every other account this site covers has some route back, however slow and however paper-heavy that route turns out to be.
Planning for self-custody works nothing like planning for an email account or a photo library. The paperwork does almost nothing. Court-issued executor papers open doors at Google and Coinbase, and they open nothing on a wallet whose phrase nobody wrote down.
The scale of the loss isn’t settled. The blockchain firm Chainalysis, in figures relayed in early 2025, put lost Bitcoin at 2.3 to 3.7 million coins.
That range is roughly 11% to 18% of the maximum supply, and those are industry figures rather than measured ones. Nobody has peer-reviewed those numbers. Chainalysis and River together trace 1.5 to 2 million Bitcoin to keys their owners forgot about. The much-repeated claim that 20% of all Bitcoin is lost goes back to a single Chainalysis estimate from 2017.
The figures disagree about size and agree about direction, because forgotten keys account for a large share of what vanished. None of it came back. If you’re holding real money here, that’s a reason to bring in a lawyer who works on digital assets and estates.
Coinbase and a self-custody wallet are different problems
Custodial services keep the keys for the customer. Coinbase sits in that group, and it runs a written process for the estate of somebody who has died.
Coinbase freezes the account once the company has notice of the death. A fiduciary then files from their own Coinbase account. That filing asks for a certified death certificate, probate papers, and photo ID, and the process starts from there. Coinbase then moves the balance across to a new account that the fiduciary opens for the job.
Two details in that sequence matter if you’re drafting a plan right now. There’s no beneficiary designation. Coinbase’s own pages describe none on consumer accounts, so probate-class papers come into every request.
Even the smooth cases reportedly run to weeks. All of that carries one caveat, because Coinbase’s own page blocked the research behind this site from reading it.
So the account above comes from more than five separate sources rather than the company’s own page. A self-custody wallet has no such route. There’s no company on the other end to file with, and no process to be quick or slow about. An executor holding a full set of court papers and a certified death certificate still can’t open that wallet.
That’s why self-custody belongs in a plan you make while you’re alive and writing things down. The wallet answers to the phrase. Neither a company nor a family tie changes what it will open for, because there’s nobody in the middle to ask.
Both halves need writing down, and they need writing down separately. What an executor can ask a custodial exchange for sits on money and crypto.
A will filed for probate becomes a public record
A will that goes through probate gets filed with a court, and court files are open for the public to read. California and Texas both put that in statute. County probate records around the country are searchable online, and consumer legal guides call the practice a national one. So a phrase written into a will ends up on a document that strangers can read.
For most of what a will contains, an open file is a nuisance rather than a hazard. For a seed phrase it’s terminal. Anybody who reads the filing can move the coins, and no reset exists anywhere to undo what they do next.
Estate lawyers draw a useful line here. The documents are there to grant authority, while the access artifacts themselves belong somewhere else.
A password manager holds one kind of access artifact, and a separately stored letter of instruction holds another. Neither one gets filed anywhere. The will names an executor and says what the estate contains, without spelling out how to open any of it. Ask the lawyer drafting those documents how the two records should point at each other.
The three-tier order that governs platform accounts finds nothing to work with here either. A self-custody wallet has no platform. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, or RUFADAA, ranks a platform’s own online tool above a will.
Where the plan lives matters as much as what it says. Credentials belong out of the will, and what belongs in a will covers that split in full.
Without an online-tool direction, RUFADAA puts the will, the trust, or the power of attorney in charge. Those documents can grant authority over a wallet. Granting authority and handing over the words are separate acts, and the second one has to happen somewhere private. How the two fit together in your state is a question for the lawyer drafting the estate documents.
A password manager can carry the phrase, within limits
A seed phrase is a string of words, so a password manager can store it like anything else. What happens after that is the question. Some managers publish an emergency-access feature that hands a chosen contact the vault after a wait, and some publish nothing.
The pattern is the same across the ones that do. A study at The Web Conference 2021 found these features usually grant the whole vault, with no way to narrow it.
The same study named a post-mortem privacy paradox, where people value planning and avoid doing it. Its sample was 14 security-aware people. The authors warn against reading it as typical, so take it as a sketch rather than a survey. It also noted that an inherited email account silently hands password-reset power over other accounts.
Bitwarden’s emergency access is the fully documented model. A premium holder invites a trusted contact. That contact can request access later, and the grant lands by itself unless the owner refuses before the wait runs out.
The minimum wait is one day, and the takeover isn’t gentle. It sets a new master password and strips every two-step login method, clearing a barrier no death certificate could.
Bitwarden’s own pages name three limits, and all three matter for a seed phrase. The scope is the whole vault. It also depends on a paid plan staying active, which nobody may think to check after a death. And nothing tells the contact that the owner has died, so the setup can sit unused for years.
Proton’s emergency access works at the account level on paid plans. It allows up to five contacts. Each waits out a set period before the grant lands by itself, on the pattern Bitwarden uses.
The counterexample is 1Password, which documents no emergency-access feature as of July 28, 2026. Staff said so in October 2025, and the request thread closed in March 2026.
It documents a printed Emergency Kit instead. The kit fails in two ordinary ways, because it goes stale and because somebody still has to find it. A claim that it shipped a digital-legacy tool in 2025 seems to confuse it with an article about legacy business software. Family and team plans also let an organiser start a recovery, which works differently from a personal vault.
Incapacity needs a document of its own
A plan written for death alone misses the case where you’re alive and unable to act. Capacity can go long before life does. A durable power of attorney appoints an agent whose authority carries on past the point where the principal can’t act.
The living-owner case is the easier one. An agent files a lighter package, and the person who set the wallet up can still be asked directly.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau advises agents to involve the principal wherever that’s possible. It also documents a recurring problem. Financial firms refuse valid powers of attorney and demand their own in-house forms, which turns awkward once the principal can no longer sign. Texas lawyer Gerry Beyer reports custodians asking for court orders whatever the statute grants.
Those findings describe custodial services rather than wallets, and both are worth knowing before a plan gets drafted. A self-custody wallet asks nobody for permission. The document that counts for it is the one telling a named person where the words really live.
Conservatorship is the weakest of these routes. The model act’s section 14 calls for a court order that specifically grants digital-asset access, beyond the appointment itself.
The concrete step here is short enough to finish this week. Write down what you hold, which wallet or service holds it, and who should learn where the phrase lives. The backup codes and recovery routes that protect the rest of an estate sit on passwords and two-factor codes. For a self-custody wallet the phrase is the estate, and a plan nobody can act on leaves the money on the chain.