How to pass on a crypto wallet without handing over the keys today

A self-custody crypto wallet has one property that makes it different from almost everything else you own: there is nobody to call. No bank to present a death certificate to, no support line, no “forgot my password” link. The twelve or twenty-four words of the recovery phrase are the wallet. Whoever holds them can move the funds, and whoever does not, cannot, ever.

That is exactly why people choose self-custody, and exactly why it goes wrong when something happens to the owner. Estimates vary, but a meaningful share of all bitcoin ever mined is believed to be permanently lost, much of it because the only person who knew where the phrase was is no longer around to say.

So the question is not whether to plan for someone else getting access. It is how to do it without weakening the one thing that makes the wallet safe today.

Why the usual answers do not quite work

Give a copy to someone you trust. This is the most common plan, and it quietly turns one secret into two. The funds are now as safe as the less careful of the two places the phrase is kept. Your trusted person can also spend today, whether they mean to or not: a burglary, a curious teenager, a phishing site that asks them to “verify” the phrase. And if the relationship changes, you cannot take the words back. You can only move everything to a new wallet.

Write it into a will. In many countries a will becomes a public document during probate, and it passes through lawyers, courts and clerks on the way. A recovery phrase written into a will is a recovery phrase published. A will is the right place to say that a wallet exists and who should inherit it. It is the wrong place for the words themselves.

A safe deposit box. Better, but slow. Heirs often need paperwork and weeks before a bank lets them open a box. And it does nothing for the other situation you should plan for: not death, but a long stretch in hospital when someone needs to act on your behalf.

Split the phrase in two. Giving half the words to each of two people sounds clever, but it does not work the way people expect. Each half reduces how much guessing is left, so whoever holds one half needs only the other. And losing either half loses everything. There are proper schemes for splitting a secret (Shamir’s Secret Sharing, multisig wallets), and if you are comfortable with them, they are good tools. They are also a lot to ask of a grieving relative who has never used a hardware wallet.

What a good handover looks like

Put the pieces together and the shape of a better answer appears:

Nobody holds the phrase today except you. Not a copy in a drawer, not half of it in someone else’s inbox.
Access is triggered by your absence, not by paperwork. You should not have to prove anything, and your family should not have to prove anything to a company.
Only the intended person can open it. Not the service that stores it, not someone who intercepts the notification, not someone who finds a laptop.
It comes with instructions. A phrase with no context is a puzzle. Which wallet app, which network, is there a passphrase, what should they not do.

This is the job Parcel Rocket was built for.

Step by step with Parcel Rocket

1. Put the wallet in the Password Manager

The Password Manager has a dedicated Crypto wallet record, with fields for the wallet address, the network, the recovery phrase, an optional passphrase, the derivation path and free-form notes. You can add custom fields for anything else.

The record is encrypted in your browser before it is saved, with a key that only your vault password can unlock. We store the ciphertext; we cannot read the phrase, and neither can anyone who breaks into our servers.

2. Create a parcel and add the wallet from the vault

A parcel is an encrypted bundle addressed to one or more people, with a deadline. When you build one, choose Add from Password Manager and pick the wallet record. It goes in exactly as stored, with no copying and pasting of the phrase into a text box.

3. Write the instructions you would give in person

Add a note to the same parcel. Imagine sitting next to the person and telling them what to do:

Which wallet software or hardware device the phrase belongs to, and where to download it from the official site.
Whether there is a passphrase (sometimes called the “25th word”) and where it is.
Never type the phrase into a website, and never share it with anyone who contacts them offering help. Scammers watch for exactly this moment.
Once the funds are reachable, move them to a new wallet they control, with a phrase of their own. The old one should be treated as exposed.
Who else to talk to: the executor, an accountant, anyone who knows about tax obligations where you live.

4. Choose questions only they can answer

Recipients do not need an account. They open the parcel by answering questions you set, and the answers themselves are the key. They are never sent to us; the parcel is encrypted in your browser with a key derived from them.

That makes the questions the most important decision in the whole process:

Pick things that are not on social media, not in public records, and not known to the wider family. “Mother’s maiden name” is a bad question; “the nickname we used for the broken car in 2011” is a good one.
Use more than one. You can set up to ten.
The answers are exact. Spaces at the ends are ignored, but capital letters and punctuation matter. Keep answers short and unambiguous, or tell the recipient in advance how you write them (“all lower case”).

A recovery phrase guarded by an answer anyone could guess is not guarded. It is worth ten minutes to get this right.

5. Set the deadline, and keep extending it

The deadline is the trigger. Until it passes, nothing is delivered. Before it passes, Parcel Rocket reminds you: seven days, three days and twelve hours ahead, by email and Telegram, and by SMS on paid plans. One click extends the parcel and the clock resets.

If you cannot extend it, the deadline passes and the recipient is sent a link. On the Free plan the window is seven days, which is enough to try the whole flow end to end. Paid plans let you set the deadline as far ahead as your subscription runs, and with Lifetime that is decades away.

6. Tell the recipient the parcel exists

Not what is in it, just that it exists, that it will arrive from Parcel Rocket, and roughly what the questions will be about. A link from an unfamiliar service on the worst week of someone’s life is easy to ignore or mistake for spam. Once they have opened it, they can download a self-contained copy to open offline, so they are not dependent on us to read it again.

Two details worth getting right

Keep the parcel title boring. The title is what you and the recipient see in lists and in some notifications, and it is not part of the encrypted content. Call it “For Anna” or “Household papers”, not “Ledger seed phrase, 3 BTC”.

Consider splitting the passphrase, not the phrase. If your wallet uses a passphrase on top of the recovery phrase, you can put the phrase in one parcel and the passphrase in another, addressed to a different person, such as your executor. Neither parcel alone moves the funds, but both people together can, without either of them holding anything today.

What this does not replace

Parcel Rocket gets the information to the right person at the right time. It does not decide who legally inherits the funds, and it does not deal with tax. Keep a will that says the wallet exists and who it is for, and let the parcel carry the part a will should never contain.

If you hold crypto, one parcel on the Free plan is enough to set this up properly today. The hardest part is not the software. It is sitting down for twenty minutes and writing the note you hope nobody ever has to read.