CustodyStress
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Part of the CustodyStress archive of observed Bitcoin custody incidents
CS-01411

The estate value at 2025 Bitcoin prices was approximately $2.3 million.

Survives
Case description
A 2025 estate case involved a Bitcoin holder who had purchased a significant amount of Bitcoin in 2013 and held it continuously in a self-custody wallet. The estate value at 2025 Bitcoin prices was approximately $2.3 million. The holder had left a comprehensive written guide for their beneficiaries explaining what Bitcoin is, how hardware wallets work, and where the seed phrase was located. The guide was found and the seed phrase was recovered. However, the guide had been written in 2016 and referenced a specific software wallet that had been discontinued. The beneficiaries required the assistance of a technical specialist to migrate from the legacy software format to a current hardware wallet, a process that took approximately two days.
Custody context
Stress conditionOwner death
Custody systemHardware wallet (single key)
OutcomeSurvives
DocumentationUnknown
Year observed2025
CountryUnited States
Structural dependencies observed
Single point of failure
Outcome interpretation
Access remained possible under the reported conditions.
Source
Privately Reported
Evidence type
News article
Related cases involving owner death
119 cases involve owner death 274 cases involve hardware wallet (single key) View archive statistics →
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Framework references
Terms guide
Survives
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.
Single-person knowledge
Recovery depended on information or capability held by one individual who was unavailable.
Institutional dependence
Recovery depended on a third-party institution or service that was inaccessible or uncooperative.
Documentation gap
Recovery depended on instructions that were missing, incomplete, or unclear.
Authority mismatch
The person with legal authority to act did not have operational access, or vice versa.
Original text
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