What Inheritance Planning Does

If you ever become incapacitated or pass away, your cryptocurrency holdings are only as recoverable as the documentation you leave behind. Inheritance Planning automates the handoff: after a configurable period of inactivity, Legacy Key grants read-only access to the contacts you've named, so they can find your wallets, your seed backups, and any multisig configurations.

The mechanic is sometimes called a dead man's switch — if you stop "checking in" (logging in) for long enough, the switch flips and your inheritance contacts are notified.

Plan availability: Inheritance Planning is a Legacy plan feature. Recovery and Personal Backup plans can still document shared access for collaborators, but the automated inactivity trigger and the inheritance email flow only run on Legacy.

Three Kinds of People, Compared

Legacy Key keeps three distinct roles separate. Knowing which is which avoids confusion when you're setting things up.

Role	Where they appear	What they can do
Recovery Contacts	Trusted Contacts list, Emergency Access Document	Documentation only — they don't log in or access the account
Shared Users	Sharing Access page	Active read-only or read & write access right now
Inheritance Contacts	Inheritance Planning page	Read-only access only after the inactivity trigger fires

The same person can hold multiple roles — for example, your spouse can be a shared user today and an inheritance contact for the day you're no longer around. Each role is configured separately.

Setting the Inactivity Period

Open Settings → Inheritance Planning → Inactivity Period and pick how long Legacy Key should wait without seeing you before triggering the handoff.

Range: 30, 60, 90, 180, or 365 days
Default: 90 days
Granularity: the timer is global — one period covers all your inheritance contacts, who are all notified together once it elapses

Tip: Match the period to how often you'd realistically log in even during a bad year. Travel, hospitalization, or a long offline period shouldn't accidentally trip the switch — but a year of total silence almost certainly means something has happened.

What Resets the Timer

The clock resets every time you sign in to Legacy Key. There is no separate "I'm still here" button — your normal login activity is the heartbeat. Reading a notification email does not reset the clock; you have to actually sign in.

Keep-Alive Reminders

To make sure you don't miss a check-in, Legacy Key can send you periodic keep-alive emails — gentle reminders to log in. Configure these in the same Inheritance Planning settings:

Weekly
Biweekly
Monthly (default)
Quarterly
Never

Keep-alive emails don't reset the timer on their own — opening the email and clicking through to sign in is what resets it.

Adding Inheritance Contacts

From Inheritance Planning → Contacts, click Add Inheritance Contact and enter:

Their email address — where the activation link will go
An optional personal message (up to 2,000 characters) that only this contact will see when access transfers

You can also write a global message on the main Inheritance Planning page that goes to every inheritance contact alongside their personal message. Use the global one for general context ("here's what to do, who to call") and the personal one for individual notes ("sis, the password to the home safe is in mom's will").

Number of contacts: the Legacy plan allows up to 5 inheritance contacts, sharing the same per-plan shared-access limit described on the Sharing Access guide.

The Warning Window

Before the switch trips, Legacy Key tries hard to get your attention. As the inactivity period winds down, you'll receive escalating warning emails:

30 d

First reminder. Sign in to confirm you're still around.

15 d

Urgent reminder. Lists which contacts will gain access if you don't respond.

5 d

Final reminder. Inheritance access will activate within a few days unless you sign in.

Each warning email lists exactly which inheritance contacts will be activated, so there's no ambiguity about what's about to happen.

What Happens When the Switch Trips

Each inheritance contact receives an email confirming access has been granted
The email includes your global message and their personal message (if any)
It contains a one-time access link that's valid for 30 days
Clicking the link signs them in (creating a Legacy Key account if they don't already have one) with read-only access to your data

What inheritance contacts can see:

Every wallet you've documented — brand, model, serial number, accounts, notes
Every backup location and access description
All multisig configurations and their uploaded config files
Your trusted contacts list
The full Emergency Access Document, ready to print or save as PDF

What they cannot do:

Edit, add, or delete anything — access is read-only
Invite new users or change sharing settings
Trigger inheritance flows on other accounts
See your Recovery Key or any seed phrase (Legacy Key never stores those)

Cancelling or Stopping the Trigger

Up to the moment the switch trips, simply signing in resets the timer — no special action required.

After the switch trips, you can revoke an inheritance contact's access at any time from the Inheritance Planning page. Revocation is immediate; the contact can no longer decrypt new data or use their access link. There's no temporary "pause" — only continued login (before trigger) or explicit revocation (after).

If you're going off-grid: bump the inactivity period up before you leave (you can change it any time), or ask a trusted person to log in on your behalf using a shared access account.

How Inheritance Stays Zero-Knowledge

Legacy Key uses zero-knowledge encryption, which means the server can't decrypt your data. So how do inheritance contacts read your wallets after the trigger?

When you enable Inheritance Planning, your symmetric encryption key is wrapped with a special escrow key and stored server-side. The escrow key only becomes usable once the inactivity trigger fires — and only on behalf of the specific contact who clicks the activation link. The contact never sees the raw key, and we don't hold a usable copy before the trigger. For more cryptographic detail, see the Security Architecture page.

Best Practices

Talk to your inheritance contacts beforehand. The email they'll receive is direct and emotionally loaded — make sure they know what to expect and what Legacy Key is.
Pair Inheritance Planning with a printed Emergency Access Document. Once the switch trips, your contacts have the data they need digitally, but a physical document stored with your estate plan is the most resilient backup.
Test your plan annually. Sign in, review your inactivity period, re-read your global message, update individual notes, and regenerate the Emergency Access Document.
Keep your contacts' email addresses current. An inheritance contact whose email no longer works can't receive the activation link.