Destroyed in fire — hardware wallet (2023)

A 2023 estate case documented by a digital asset recovery professional involved a holder who had used Shamir's Secret Sharing to split their seed phrase across five family members, each holding a fragment. After the holder's death, two of the five holders had died themselves in the intervening years, and a third had lost their fragment in a house fire. The remaining two fragments were below the recovery threshold. The sophisticated security setup had become the mechanism of permanent loss because no succession plan for the fragment holders had been created.