Traditional inheritance methods require disclosing asset information to notaries and lawyers. For a Bitcoin holder who has spent years building operational privacy, this can undermine all their efforts.
In this article, we will explore how to pass on cryptocurrency to family members while preserving confidentiality, in collaboration with the team at Mixer.Money.
The Dead Man's Chest
According to River, approximately 1.57 million BTC are considered permanently lost due to forgotten keys and loss of access. Adding Satoshi Nakamoto's coins (968,000 BTC) raises the total to 2.53 million BTC—about 12.1% of the total supply.
Source: River.In June 2025, Fidelity Digital Assets analyst Zak Wainwright noted that the "ancient supply" of Bitcoin—coins that have not moved on the blockchain for over 10 years—has surpassed 3.4 million BTC (17% of the total supply). On average, 566 BTC per day transition into the "ancient" category, while post-2024 halving, miners produce about 450 BTC daily. For the first time, the rate of "aging" supply has outpaced the rate of new issuance. Fidelity estimates that by 2028, the share of the "ancient" supply could reach 20%, and by 2035, 30%.
According to a survey by the Cremation Institute, 89% of crypto investors worry about what will happen to their assets after death, but only 23% have a documented inheritance plan. Crypto holders are four times less likely to create wills compared to other investors.
However, formalizing inheritance through legal procedures requires disclosing information—resulting in lawyers, notaries, and tax authorities gaining access to asset data.
"Seed phrases and other sensitive information should never be included in a will solely for the sake of asset security. It’s better to inform loved ones in advance in case of unforeseen circumstances and additionally create a memo with instructions on accessing wallets," recommend Mixer.Money.
The document should detail the operation of the inheritance tools listed below. Their essence is that the owner retains full control over the assets until death, after which relatives gain access without disclosing unnecessary information.
How Bitcoin Inheritance Services Work
The market has developed two main approaches to transferring crypto assets while maintaining privacy: commercial multisig solutions with assistance and on-chain wallets based on Miniscript with time locks.
Casa: Multisig with Six-Month Verification
The Casa service offers one of the most comprehensive commercial implementations of crypto inheritance. The mechanism is included in the subscription cost, starting at $250 per year for the Standard plan and above.
The owner stores Bitcoin in a multisig vault and designates a recipient through the Casa app. The recipient creates a free account. KYC is not required by default; in the basic scenario, identity verification is optional.
Until the transfer occurs, the owner retains full control over the funds. When the recipient initiates an inheritance request, Casa starts a six-month verification period. During this time, the owner receives notifications. If they do not cancel the request, access transfers to the recipient. A death certificate or court ruling is not required—just an email suffices.
Casa also offers an Enhanced Verification mode for clients in the U.S. In this option, both the owner and recipient provide documents, and a death certificate is required to initiate the transfer—eliminating the six-month waiting period.
The main compromise is reliance on Casa's infrastructure. If the company ceases operations, heirs will need to recover access themselves using keys from the multisig vault. They can only transfer funds if they have enough keys to meet the signing threshold (e.g., 2 of 3 or 3 of 5).
Liana: Time Locks Without Intermediaries
The Liana wallet from Wizardsardine employs a fundamentally different approach. Instead of relying on intermediaries, the entire logic of inheritance is encoded in Bitcoin script and executed by the network itself.
Liana operates on Miniscript—a standardized language for creating complex Bitcoin spending conditions. The owner sets two key sets: a primary key for everyday use and a backup key for the heir.
Source: Liana Wallet.The backup key "sleeps" and activates only after a specified period of inactivity by the owner—ranging from 1 (~10 minutes) to 65,535 blocks (~15 months). The maximum is a protocol limitation of Bitcoin, as the time lock value is stored in the transaction in a fixed-size field—only 16 bits are allocated for it. As long as the owner conducts transactions, the timer resets continuously.
Other configurations include an "expanding" multisig: for example, 2-of-2 initially, then 2-of-3 after six months. This flexibility allows for multi-tiered recovery scenarios—from the most secure to the most accessible.
Source: Liana Wallet.Liana uses Taproot descriptors: the recovery path is hidden in the blockchain until activation. To an outside observer, transactions appear as ordinary transfers—the existence of inheritance conditions is not reflected in public data.
The wallet is compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux, and works with hardware devices like Ledger, Coldcard, BitBox, and Jade.
A limitation is UTXO management: each output has its own timer, and the owner periodically needs to send coins to themselves for "refreshing," incurring fees. Liana supports UTXO management—manual selection and labeling of coins for each transaction, simplifying this task.
Shamir's Secret as an Additional Tool
Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) algorithm splits the seed phrase into several parts. To recover it, a predetermined number of shares must be collected. If there are fewer shares, they reveal nothing.
The SLIP39 standard, developed by SatoshiLabs, encodes each share as 20 or 33 words from a designated dictionary. Hardware support includes Trezor Safe (default backup method since June 2024) and Keystone 3 Pro. Software wallets like Electrum and Sparrow also support this standard.
For inheritance, a 3-of-5 scheme can distribute shares among a home safe, spouse, parent, bank safe deposit box, and lawyer. An important difference from multisig is that SSS only protects the backup of the seed phrase. When shares are combined, the full seed phrase ends up on one device, creating a vulnerability window that multisig avoids.
Why Privacy is Critical for Heirs
When Bitcoin moves from a deceased person's wallet to a new address, analysts track this transfer. If the recipient then consolidates received UTXOs or combines them with their own coins, address clustering links the entire history of their wallet to the deceased's assets.
Once an heir uses a KYC exchange, the chain between on-chain activity and real identity closes. Users who wish to maintain maximum anonymity of received funds should sever ties with transaction history using Bitcoin mixers.
The Mixer.Money service splits Bitcoins into random parts and sends them to investors' wallets. The user receives coins back from other platforms with a completely different history. In "Full Anonymity" mode, clients receive funds from major exchanges, so the fact of using the mixer is entirely concealed.
An important rule: after mixing, do not combine anonymized UTXOs with coins withdrawn from exchanges after KYC. One combined transaction nullifies all efforts at anonymization.
Recommendations for Estate Planning
2025 has seen a record number of physical attacks on cryptocurrency holders: 72 wrench attacks have been recorded. This is a 75% increase compared to the previous year.
Against the backdrop of rising threats, privacy becomes not just a convenience but a security issue. If an attacker de-anonymizes an owner of a significant amount, the risk of extortion and violence sharply increases.
To build a reliable plan for the safe transfer of funds, experts at Mixer.Money recommend regularly updating it as wallets, balances, and security settings change.
It is also crucial to educate technically unprepared heirs; otherwise, they may enter the seed phrase into compromised software or fall victim to scams. Finally, the inheritance plan should be tested in practice.
The optimal Bitcoin inheritance strategy combines three elements: informing family members, secure storage, and on-chain privacy.
Do not disclose specific amounts in documents that may become public. Use Bitcoin mixers to sever on-chain connections.