Uphold launched Vault Inheritance for XRP, BTC and HBAR on September 29, 2026. The service costs $19.99 monthly, with a 30-day free trial for US subscribers. Uphold estimates about 4 million
Uphold has added an inheritance feature to its Vault wallet, letting XRP, Bitcoin and Hedera holders designate beneficiaries who can claim their assets after the owner's death. The company launched the service, called Vault Inheritance, on September 29, and pricing starts at $19.99 per month, with US subscribers receiving a 30-day free trial. The rollout completes a build-out that began in December 2023, when Vault went live with XRP as its first supported asset; Bitcoin support followed in April 2024. Vault runs on an assisted self-custody model: customers keep control of their holdings while Uphold provides support, including help replacing the cryptographic keys used to authorize transactions, a function that becomes decisive when the original holder is gone. That key-replacement capability is what makes the inheritance layer workable, because an heir needs transaction authority, not merely a legal claim to the balance. Uphold consumer business president Nancy Beaton framed the product as a first for the industry: “a reliable, simple way to ensure their crypto is passed on exactly as they intend.” The launch targets an access problem rather than an ownership problem. Unlike a traditional brokerage account, holdings in a blockchain wallet can stay unreachable even when heirs inherit them under the law, because without usable credentials nobody can move the funds. The service covers XRP, Bitcoin (BTC) and Hedera (HBAR), a network built on a directed acyclic graph, and it executes through verified documents rather than stored passwords. The mechanism works whether the XRP price sits near an all-time high or well below it, since the transfer hinges on identity checks and legal review, not on market levels. For holders managing balances over long horizons, the feature adds an XRP estate-planning layer to self-custody, a practice central to web3. Uphold presents the release as the latest step in a roadmap it began three years ago.
The process begins while the account owner is alive. Customers invite a beneficiary through a personal dashboard, and the designated person receives a notification with account setup instructions. The beneficiary must open an account on the platform to receive the eventual distribution, and the owner can change the choice at any time. After the owner's death, Uphold's compliance support team reviews the legal documents, and the holdings move into the beneficiary's wallet only once the claim is approved. Until approval, the funds remain in the deceased customer's account, which keeps the balance sealed while the estate is verified. Historically, Bitcoin self-custody planning meant handing passwords, personal identification numbers and recovery information to a trusted relative, often alongside written instructions and a backup seed phrase of the kind covered in our Ripple paper wallet guide. Uphold ties the new layer to a larger access gap. The company estimates that around 4 million BTC are considered trapped, worth roughly $331 billion, a total that includes holdings affected by an owner's death or by lost credentials. A separate body of research points the same way: the bitcoin financial services firm River estimates that 1.57 million bitcoin are permanently lost, with 98% of those losses occurring before 2020. Both counts carry uncertainty, since dormant addresses can belong to long-term holders rather than lost keys, and different assumptions about early mining holdings shift the lost-coin total. Private keys, the secret credentials that authorize spending, control access to a wallet no matter what inheritance documents say, a requirement that exists independently of ownership records. The new scheme closes that gap by connecting a verified claim to delivery of the crypto authority needed to manage the deceased's investments. Uphold positions the feature as an extension of a product that already pairs key replacement with trading services on the platform.
The structural point behind the launch is that inheritance law and on-chain authority are separate systems, and an estate plan that solves only the first still strands the funds. The primary record here is Uphold's own announcement, which states plainly that beneficiaries receive nothing until a claim is approved, leaving the deceased customer's balance locked through the compliance review. The $331 billion trapped-asset figure comes from the provider itself and should be read as an estimate; River's more conservative count of permanently lost bitcoin, 1.57 million, sits far below it. The next dated step is already scheduled: existing Vault customers move to revised pricing after December 31, 2026.
This article was originally published on COINOTAG.
