Crypto wallet inheritance is the problem of moving self-custodied cryptocurrency to the people you intend without handing them control today. It is the hardest transfer problem in estate planning, because the asset is governed by cryptographic keys rather than by any institution that can be petitioned.
The distinction that matters is custody. Coins held on an exchange sit with a company that has records, a support function, and often a documented inheritance process — closer to a brokerage account. Coins in a wallet you control yourself have no counterparty at all. No court order, executor appointment, or death certificate produces a private key that nobody recorded.
This makes the failure mode absolute. An unrecoverable seed phrase is not a delay or an expense; the balance stays visible on-chain forever and is permanently immovable. Estates have lost substantial sums this way, and there is no appeal, no insurer, and no institution to escalate to.
Workable approaches all balance the same tension: the material must be recoverable after death but not exposed before it. That points toward splitting recovery information so no single person holds enough alone, using encrypted storage that releases on verified conditions, and — critically — telling your executor that the assets exist at all. Documenting the location and the method, without exposing the secret itself, is the core of the task.