About the Archive
The Bitcoin Custody Incident Archive is a documented record of observed cases in which access or recovery by a legitimate owner, heir, or authorised party became constrained, delayed, or blocked. It is published by CustodyStress, Inc. as an independent research and reference resource.
What the archive documents
The archive documents custody survivability failures — situations where someone with legitimate authority to access Bitcoin encountered a structural barrier to doing so. Each case involves a legitimate owner, heir, executor, or authorised party who could not access Bitcoin they were entitled to access, and where the barrier is attributable to a custody structure failure rather than a security breach by an unauthorised actor.
Cases are organised by stress condition (the structural factor that caused the failure), custody system type, outcome state, and structural dependencies. The archive currently contains 895 published cases.
What the archive does not document
The archive excludes theft, fraud against the holder, exchange hacks where the holder is the victim of unauthorised access, and market losses. It also excludes cases where insufficient public documentation exists to classify the stress condition and outcome with reasonable confidence. The absence of a case from the archive does not mean it did not occur.
The archive is not exhaustive. Statistics derived from it describe observed distributions within documented cases — they are not estimates of population-level Bitcoin custody failure rates.
How cases are selected
Cases are drawn from public reports, court filings, professional observations, and sourced submissions. Each case is reviewed for structural relevance before inclusion. Inclusion requires: a legitimate party encountered a barrier to accessing Bitcoin they were entitled to access; the barrier is attributable to a custody structure failure; and sufficient public documentation exists to classify the case.
Coercion cases are included because the access failure is structural — the holder is a legitimate party whose access is being forced — even though the mechanism involves an attacker.
How classifications are assigned
Each case is classified by its primary stress condition — the structural factor that caused or enabled the access failure. Outcome states (blocked, constrained, survives, indeterminate) describe what happened under the documented conditions, not what is possible under all circumstances. A blocked outcome means no recovery was documented; it does not mean recovery was impossible.
Structural dependencies are classified from available case documentation. Dependency classification reflects the custody failure mechanism, not a complete audit of the holder's setup.
Limitations
The archive has four main limitations. First, case selection depends on public documentation — cases that were never publicly reported are not in the archive. Second, outcome classification depends on available sources — indeterminate outcomes reflect cases where the final result is unknown, not necessarily bad. Third, the archive does not model all possible Bitcoin custody failure modes — it documents observed incidents. Fourth, archive statistics should not be treated as actuarial data; they describe this archive's composition, not the broader Bitcoin ecosystem.
How to cite the archive
Short form
Bitcoin Custody Incident Archive, CustodyStress. custodystress.com/cases
Full reference
Bitcoin Custody Incident Archive. CustodyStress, Inc. Retrieved [date]. https://custodystress.com/cases
Citation of a case from the archive should reference the case URL directly. Individual case pages include a reference ID and incident year where available.
Editorial standards
The archive applies a consistent classification framework across all cases. Cases are not included to make a point about any particular custody product, platform, or approach. The archive does not endorse any custody method, recovery service, or Bitcoin product. It describes observed structural failures — what happened, under what conditions, with what outcome.
The archive is descriptive, not prescriptive. It does not provide custody advice, recovery guidance, or recommendations.
Contact
For questions about specific cases, case submissions, or archive methodology:
contact@custodystress.com
For professional inquiries about the assessment product: professional@custodystress.com
Published by CustodyStress, Inc. The archive methodology is versioned and documented at /cases/methodology.
Outcome terms
Survived
Access remained possible under the reported conditions.
Constrained
Access remained possible, but only with delay, dependence, or significant difficulty.
Blocked
Access was not possible under the reported conditions.
Indeterminate
There was not enough information to determine the outcome.
Assessment terms
Survivability
The degree to which a custody system maintains the possibility of authorized recovery under stress.
This archive documents cases where a legitimate owner, heir, or authorized party encountered barriers accessing or recovering Bitcoin due to a failure in the custody arrangement. The central question for inclusion is: did the custody structure fail a legitimate access or recovery attempt?
Inclusion requirements
A case must satisfy all three of the following to be included:
- Legitimate access attempt. The person attempting to access or recover the Bitcoin was the owner, a designated heir, an executor, a legal authority, or another party with a legitimate claim — not a thief, attacker, or unauthorized third party.
- Custody structure failure. The failure was caused by a property of the custody arrangement — missing credentials, structural dependencies, documentation gaps, knowledge concentration, legal barriers, or institutional constraints — not market conditions, individual-level fraud or theft, or protocol-level issues. Platform-level failures that block legitimate user access are in scope regardless of their cause.
- Documentable outcome or access constraint. The case must have a stated or inferable outcome: access blocked, access constrained, access delayed, or access eventually achieved through a recovery path. Cases with entirely unknown outcomes are included only where the structural failure is documented and the constraint is unambiguous.
In scope
- Owner death or incapacity — Bitcoin held in self-custody that becomes inaccessible to heirs or designated parties because credentials, documentation, or operational knowledge were not transferred
- Passphrase loss — BIP39 passphrase forgotten or unavailable, blocking access to a funded wallet even where the seed phrase is present
- Seed phrase or wallet backup unavailable — no independent recovery path existed or the backup was destroyed, lost, or never created
- Device loss without independent backup — hardware wallet, phone, or computer lost or destroyed with no recovery path outside the device
- Documentation absent or ambiguous — heirs or executors cannot determine that Bitcoin exists, which wallet holds it, or how to access it
- Knowledge concentration — only one person knew the procedure, passphrase, or access method; that person is dead, incapacitated, or unreachable
- Multisig quorum failure — a threshold signature arrangement cannot be completed because signers are unavailable, uncooperative, incapacitated, or have lost their keys
- Legal authority / access mismatch — a court order, probate ruling, or power of attorney establishes legal entitlement but provides no technical path to access
- Institutional custody barrier — exchange or platform hacks, insolvency, regulatory seizure, or operational failure that caused a access constraint or failure for legitimate users, whether temporary, prolonged, or permanent. The failure of the custodian to remain available or solvent is itself the in-scope event.
- Forced relocation or geographic constraint — physical access to a device or location required for recovery is blocked by displacement, border restrictions, or political circumstances
- Coercion — the holder was compelled under threat to transfer Bitcoin or disclose credentials during an access event
- Hidden asset discovery — heirs or executors locate a wallet or account but cannot access it due to missing credentials or operational knowledge
Out of scope
- Market losses, investment losses, yield scheme losses, or Ponzi scheme losses
- Hacks or theft targeting an individual's personal security (phishing, SIM swap, social engineering, malware) where the custody architecture itself did not fail
- Unauthorized transfers where the holder's custody system was not the cause of the failure
- Ordinary transaction mistakes — wrong-address sends, fee errors, mistaken amounts
- Protocol-level failures — cryptographic vulnerabilities, consensus bugs, firmware integrity failures
- Deliberate burns or tribute burns
- Cases where the stated loss is unverifiable and no structural custody failure is described
Source and verification
Cases are drawn from public sources including forum posts, news reporting, court documents, academic research, and direct submissions. Each case is reviewed against the inclusion criteria above before publication. Source material is retained and available on request for documented cases.
The archive is observational and descriptive. It does not attempt to document all Bitcoin custody failures — only those meeting the criteria above with sufficient documentation to describe the structural failure and its outcome.
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