Uphold announced on September 29 that it is adding inheritance planning to Vault, its assisted self-custody wallet, letting customers name a beneficiary for their Bitcoin (BTC), XRP and Hedera (HBAR) holdings. The feature, called Vault Inheritance, targets a gap the company says has left almost 4 million BTC, worth roughly $331 billion, stranded in wallets whose owners died or lost their private keys.
Unlike a bank account or brokerage, a crypto wallet cannot be recovered by an heir who lacks the keys. Legal ownership may pass on, but the cryptographic control needed to move the assets often does not. Uphold’s answer is a designated beneficiary who can claim the assets after the owner’s death without ever holding access to them beforehand.
How the inheritance claim works
A Vault customer invites a beneficiary directly from the dashboard, and that person is notified and guided to set up an Uphold account to receive the assets later. The beneficiary gets no access while the owner is alive, and the designation can be changed at any time. After the owner passes, Uphold’s compliance team verifies the legal documentation before transferring control into the beneficiary’s Uphold wallet. The company says the beneficiary needs no prior crypto knowledge. Uphold Vault itself launched in December 2023, pairing self-custody with built-in key replacement and instant access to trading.
Pricing and the estate-planning gap
Vault Inheritance costs $19.99 a month. Existing Vault customers will see the new plan reflected after December 31, 2026, while U.S. users get a free 30-day trial. “Crypto has become a real part of how people build their financial future, but unlike traditional assets, there are few ways to pass it on securely — especially for XRP holders,” said Nancy Beaton, Uphold’s president of consumer.
A growing self-custody trend
The launch lands months after Kresus introduced its own crypto inheritance service for self-custody users in July, a sign that wallet providers are moving to close the estate-planning hole as crypto matures into a long-term holding. Analysts have long warned that billions of dollars in crypto could vanish into dead wallets, and inheritance features are one of the first product-level answers to that risk.
