Uphold has rolled out Vault Inheritance, which is described as a legacy-planning option for customers who keep Bitcoin, XRP, and Hedera in the platform’s assisted self-custody wallet.
The company framed the product as a response to a problem unique to crypto: legal title can pass to an heir, but the cryptographic control needed to move coins often does not.
Vault itself launched in late 2023 as a 2-of-3 multisignature wallet inside the Uphold app.
Two keys belong to the user and one belongs to Uphold.
Two signatures are required to move funds, so the firm cannot unilaterally spend customer assets, while users still get help replacing a lost key and can trade without first leaving the app.
Inheritance is now layered on that structure. A holder invites a beneficiary from the Vault dashboard.
The invitee must be at least 18 and hold an Uphold account.
That person receives no view of balances, history, or addresses while the owner is alive, and the designation can be changed at any time.
After a death, the beneficiary starts a claim in the app and submits official records such as a certified death certificate or probate order.
Uphold’s compliance team reviews the paperwork.
Only after that review does the firm co-sign a transfer of Vault holdings into the beneficiary’s own Uphold wallet.
The company says the beneficiary needs no prior crypto experience.
For XRP, the ledger’s reserve rules still apply, so a small amount of XRP must remain in the account.
Nancy Beaton, Uphold’s president of consumer, said digital assets have become part of how many people build wealth, yet few simple tools exist to pass them on securely, “especially for XRP holders.”
The firm cited widely circulated estimates that millions of bitcoin—valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars—sit in wallets that are effectively unreachable because owners died or lost keys.
Those figures mix several kinds of inaccessibility and should be treated as industry estimates rather than a precise inventory.
Even so, they capture the practical gap the product is meant to close.
Vault currently supports BTC, XRP, HBAR, and a short list of XRPL tokens, with more networks planned.
Availability follows Uphold’s existing footprint, including the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area, most US states, and other supported regions.
The design is a compromise.
Users keep day-to-day control and can still move coins independently if Uphold’s systems fail.
They also accept a paid subscription and place trust in the firm to verify claims and co-sign the final transfer.
That is different from leaving seed phrases in a will or relying on a purely self-managed wallet, where a missing phrase can lock an estate out of the funds forever.
It is also different from a conventional brokerage account, where beneficiary designations are usually free and the custodian already holds the assets.
For holders who want self-custody without treating key management as a family project, Vault Inheritance is a narrower, productized path: name one adult beneficiary, keep the coins private in life, and let a documented claim, plus Uphold’s remaining key, complete the handoff after death.