Documentation absent — hardware wallet 2025

A 2025 estate case involved a deceased holder who had created a multi-location backup strategy for their seed phrase, storing individual groups of words at different physical locations. The holder had documented the backup strategy in a password-protected document. The password for that document was unknown to the family. The family knew the strategy existed—the holder had referenced it verbally—but could not access the master document describing which words were stored where. The physical locations were known; the problem was that without the master document's mapping, the family could not assemble the 24 words in the correct order even after retrieving all the individual groups.