Uphold Rolls Out Inheritance Service for Bitcoin, XRP, and HBAR Vault Users

Uphold, a digital asset platform, has launched a $19.99 monthly inheritance service for users of its Vault product. The service, called Vault Inheritance, allows customers to name a beneficiary for their Bitcoin, XRP, or HBAR holdings. This feature aims to address a long-standing issue in the crypto space: what happens to digital assets when the owner dies without sharing access credentials.

The Vault Inheritance service is designed to prevent beneficiaries from gaining control while the owner is still alive. A Vault customer selects a beneficiary from the dashboard, and that person is notified and asked to create an Uphold account. However, the beneficiary cannot access or move any assets until Uphold's compliance team validates a death claim.

The service targets a fundamental weakness in self-custody: legal ownership of crypto does not provide access to private keys. Traditional self-custody arrangements often require heirs to have seed phrases, hardware wallets, or detailed technical instructions, which can be lost or never shared, resulting in permanent loss of assets.

Uphold estimates that nearly 4 million BTC, worth roughly $331 billion, may already be stranded in wallets due to lost private keys or death without leaving usable access credentials. The company's Vault product already includes a key replacement service that helps users recover access if they lose a private key.