How to Recover Crypto From a Deceased Relative's Wallet (and What to Never Do First)

If someone you love has died and you believe they owned cryptocurrency, there are two possible situations and they could not be more different. If the crypto sat on an exchange — Coinbase, Kraken, Binance — there is a company with a legal department, a documented estate process, and an obligation to release the assets to the rightful heir. If the crypto sat in a self-custody wallet — a hardware device, a phone app, a piece of paper in a drawer — there is no company, no support line, and no appeal. In that second case the only thing that can release the money is the recovery phrase, and if it was never written down, no lawyer, court order or recovery service on earth can retrieve it.

This guide is written for the person doing the searching, not the person doing the planning. It covers how to find out whether crypto exists at all, the exact documents the major exchanges require from an estate, how to restore a self-custody wallet safely — and the one mistake that can destroy a hardware wallet permanently in three attempts.

The short version

Start by working out where the crypto lived, because that decides everything. For exchange accounts, you contact the exchange's estate team and supply a death certificate, court documents proving you represent the estate, your photo ID and a signed instruction letter. For self-custody wallets, you need the 12- to 24-word recovery phrase, which restores the wallet on any compatible device without the original hardware. Before touching anything, stop and read the warning about PINs below.

Before you touch anything: do not guess the PIN

This is the most urgent thing on this page, and almost nobody knows it.

A hardware wallet has two independent secrets. The PIN unlocks that one physical device. The recovery phrase is the actual master key to the money and works on any compatible device. They are not the same thing, and they do not protect each other.

Hardware wallets are deliberately built to destroy their contents rather than allow a stranger to guess their way in. According to Ledger's own support documentation: "After three incorrect PIN entries, Ledger devices reset to factory settings, erasing the private keys from their secure storage." Three attempts. Not ten, not fifty — three.

Trezor devices set the threshold higher but the outcome is identical. Trezor's documentation states that after 10 incorrect attempts a Trezor Safe 7 "automatically resets, and the wallet is erased," and that after 16 incorrect attempts the Trezor Safe 5, Safe 3, Model T and Model One do the same.

Here is why this matters so much for a grieving family. If you have the recovery phrase, a wiped device is a minor inconvenience — you restore the wallet and the money is fine. If you do not have the recovery phrase, those three PIN guesses are the entire remaining value of the asset. A widow trying her husband's birthday, then their anniversary, then their child's birthday has, in under a minute, permanently destroyed the only copy of the key.

Put the device down. Find the recovery phrase first. The device is worthless without the phrase, and almost worthless with it.

How do I find out whether they owned crypto at all?

Crypto leaves a paper trail even when the wallet itself is invisible. Work through these in order — the first two find most cases.

• Bank and card statements. Look for transfers to Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Gemini, Crypto.com, Revolut or any name you do not recognise. Buying crypto almost always required moving money from a normal bank account, and that transfer is on a statement.
• Email. Search their inbox for "Coinbase", "wallet", "seed phrase", "recovery phrase", "Ledger", "Trezor", "2FA", "verify your account". Exchanges send receipts, tax summaries and login alerts relentlessly.
• Tax returns. In many countries, disposals of crypto had to be declared. A prior year's return may name the holdings or the platform.
• Their phone and computer. Look for wallet apps (MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Exodus, Blue Wallet), authenticator apps, and password managers. The password manager is often the single richest find.
• Physical objects. A hardware wallet looks like a USB stick. A recovery phrase is 12 to 24 ordinary English words, often on a card that shipped with the device, a sheet of paper, or a stamped metal plate. Check safes, filing cabinets, bibles, book spines, sock drawers and safety deposit boxes.
• The people around them. A sibling, an adult child or a colleague may know the platform even if they do not know the amounts.

Write down everything you find in one place as you go, including partial findings. Fragments combine.

Exchange or self-custody — why the difference decides everything

Once you know where the assets lived, the path forks and never rejoins.

Custodial (an exchange). The exchange holds the keys on the customer's behalf. The balance is a legal claim against a company, much like a bank deposit. It is recoverable through law: probate, documents, a compliance review. Slow, bureaucratic, but genuinely recoverable.

Self-custody (a wallet they controlled). The keys existed only in their possession. There is no institution in the middle, so there is no institution to petition. Recovery is governed by mathematics, not law — either you have the phrase or you do not.

This is also why laws that help with other digital accounts do not solve crypto. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), adopted across the large majority of US states, gives an executor a legal route to compel a custodian — an email provider, a social network, an exchange — to grant access. It is genuinely useful, and it is powerless against self-custody, because there is nobody to serve the order on.

How do I claim crypto held on an exchange?

Each major exchange publishes its own estate process. The document lists below are quoted from the exchanges' own current help pages, and they are strikingly consistent: proof of death, proof that you legally represent the estate, proof of who you are, and a signed instruction.

Coinbase — its process runs through what it calls Executor Services. Coinbase requires the "official death certificate"; probate documents for the estate — "Probate, Letters Testamentary, Letters of Administration, Affidavit for Collection, or Small Estate Affidavit"; "a current, valid government-issued photo ID of the person(s) named in the probate documents"; and "a letter signed by the person(s) named in the probate documents directing Coinbase to transfer the assets to the specified account."

Kraken — its Deceased Client Account Claims process asks for a complete colour image of the official death certificate, and warns specifically that "certificates issued by funeral homes are not accepted." It also requires a "document confirming your appointment as legal representative to the deceased's estate (such as probate or letters of administration)," a valid government photo ID, and "a signed and dated letter" from the legal representative confirming the death and identifying themselves.

Binance.US — its process for collecting funds from a deceased user's account is unusual in one respect: alongside the death certificate, government ID and "last will and testament and/or probate documents," it also asks for "a selfie video stating the preferred method of transfer of the deceased user's assets."

Three practical notes. First, Small Estate Affidavits are widely accepted — both Coinbase and Binance.US name them explicitly, so a modest holding may not require full probate. Second, do not attempt to log in as the deceased even if you have the password; it breaches the terms of service and can freeze the very account you are claiming. Third, expect weeks, not days, and keep every document you send.

How do I recover crypto from a self-custody wallet?

Everything here depends on the recovery phrase, so understand what it is before you touch it.

The recovery phrase is defined by a public standard called BIP-39, deployed in 2013. It encodes the wallet's master secret as ordinary words — the standard permits 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 of them, with 12 and 24 by far the most common. Those words are run through a key-derivation function to produce the wallet's 512-bit master seed, from which every address and key is derived.

The consequence that matters to an heir: the phrase is the wallet. The original hardware is not required. If you have the words, you can restore the entire wallet onto a new device or a reputable wallet application and move the assets. If the device was lost, broken, thrown away or wiped by three bad PIN guesses, the phrase still works.

The reverse is equally true and far crueller: possessing the device without the phrase gives you a locked box with three attempts left and no key.

If you have found the phrase, take these precautions before using it:

1. Confirm the estate's authority first. Moving assets you are not yet entitled to can create real legal problems, even when you are the obvious heir. Take advice.
2. Type the words into a wallet you chose, on a device you control — never into a link, a support agent's screen-share, or a website someone sent you.
3. Never photograph the phrase, email it, or store it in cloud notes. Anyone who reads those words owns the money instantly and irreversibly.
4. Check for a passphrase. Some wallets add a 25th word or "hidden wallet" passphrase that is not part of the printed phrase. If the restored wallet shows a zero balance but you are confident funds existed, an extra passphrase is the most likely explanation.
5. Look for staked or locked positions. Assets delegated to a validator are not immediately transferable and can carry a mandatory waiting period before they can be moved.

What if there is no recovery phrase anywhere?

You deserve an honest answer: if the crypto was in self-custody and the recovery phrase cannot be found, the assets are almost certainly unrecoverable. No court order, no exchange, no specialist firm can reverse that. It is the intended behaviour of the technology.

This is not a rare tragedy. Analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain by Chainalysis, reported by Fortune in April 2024, found roughly 1.8 million bitcoin — about 8.5% of the entire 21 million supply, worth around $121 billion at the time — had not moved in more than a decade; counting the roughly 1.1 million bitcoin attributed to Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, the total sitting motionless reaches about 2.9 million coins.

The single most famous case is a reminder of how thin the margin can be. As the New York Times reported in January 2021, the programmer Stefan Thomas held 7,002 bitcoin whose key sat on an encrypted IronKey drive, and had used 8 of his 10 permitted password attempts. Two guesses stood between him and a fortune.

Before you conclude the money is gone, exhaust these:

• The password manager's deleted items and older backups.
• Any safety deposit box, and any solicitor or notary holding sealed documents.
• Old laptops, phones and external drives that were never wiped.
• A partial phrase. If you have most of the words, or all the words in the wrong order, a reputable specialist may genuinely be able to help — the mathematics permits it. A completely missing phrase does not.

How do I avoid crypto recovery scams while grieving?

Bereavement plus crypto is a fraudster's ideal target: high stakes, urgency, unfamiliar technology, and payments that cannot be reversed. The US Federal Trade Commission's guidance on cryptocurrency and scams is blunt that crypto transfers are irreversible and that scammers routinely impersonate legitimate businesses and government agencies.

Three rules will keep you safe from nearly all of it:

• Nobody legitimate ever needs your recovery phrase. Not an exchange, not a wallet's support team, not a "blockchain recovery specialist." A request for those words is proof of fraud, with no exceptions.
• Legitimate help never demands an upfront fee to unlock funds you cannot see. Advance-fee recovery services are the classic follow-on scam.
• Refuse urgency. Estates move slowly and that is normal. Anyone insisting you must act within hours is managing you, not helping you.

What are the tax and legal duties on inherited crypto?

This is jurisdiction-specific and you should take professional advice, but the broad shape in the United States is worth knowing. The IRS established in Notice 2014-21 that virtual currency is treated as property for federal tax purposes. Because it is property, the ordinary inheritance rules follow: the general basis rule for property acquired from a decedent sets the heir's cost basis at the fair market value on the date of death, and holdings must be reported in the gross estate where an estate tax return is required.

The practical takeaway for an executor: record the value on the date of death, in writing, with a screenshot or exchange statement, before anything is moved. Reconstructing that number later is difficult and it determines the tax on every future sale.

The Islamic dimension: an estate must be known before it can be divided

For Muslim families, an unfindable asset is not only a financial loss. Faraid — the Qur'anic distribution of an estate — presumes the estate can be identified. A holding no one can locate cannot be valued, cannot be divided among the heirs entitled to it, and cannot be used to settle the debts that Islamic tradition treats as a charge against the estate before any inheritance is distributed. Crypto that dies with its owner quietly denies specific people a share that was theirs by right.

Leaving a clear record is not merely administrative tidiness. It is the mechanism by which a religious obligation becomes possible to fulfil.

If you are reading this as the owner, not the heir

Everything above is a reconstruction problem created in about ten minutes of avoidance. The fix is small and unglamorous: write down what you hold, where it lives, and how to reach it — then make sure exactly the right people can find that record at exactly the right time, and nobody else can find it at all.

That is precisely what WiseEnding's Family Vault does. Your holdings, wallets, exchange accounts and instructions are stored under zero-knowledge encryption, so we cannot read them. A dead man's switch releases them to the people you named if you ever cannot — and only then. Your family never has to search bank statements, guess a PIN three times, or wonder whether something existed at all.

Nobody should inherit a mystery. Least of all from someone who loved them.