Uphold has introduced Vault Inheritance, a legacy-planning feature for customers holding Bitcoin, XRP and Hedera in its assisted self-custody wallet. The service is available through Uphold Vault, which launched in late 2023 as a 2-of-3 multisignature wallet inside the Uphold app. Two keys belong to the user and one belongs to Uphold, requiring two signatures to move funds.
The inheritance tool costs $19.99 per month, with U.S. customers receiving a 30-day free trial. Existing Vault customers are expected to move to the new pricing after December 31. A customer can name an adult beneficiary from the Vault dashboard, but that person receives no access to balances, history or addresses while the owner is alive. The designation can also be changed at any time.
After the owner dies, the beneficiary submits a claim through the app and provides official records such as a certified death certificate or probate order. Uphold’s compliance team verifies the paperwork before co-signing a transfer of the Vault holdings into the beneficiary’s own Uphold wallet. The company said the beneficiary needs no prior crypto experience.
Uphold framed the product as a response to a problem unique to crypto: legal title can pass to an heir, but cryptographic control may not. The firm cited widely circulated estimates that nearly 4 million BTC, worth roughly $331 billion, may be stranded because owners lost private keys or died without leaving usable access credentials. Those figures blend several forms of inaccessibility and should be treated as industry estimates.
Nancy Beaton, Uphold’s president of consumer, said digital assets have become part of how many people build wealth, yet few simple tools exist to pass them on securely, “especially for XRP holders.”
Vault currently supports BTC, XRP, HBAR and a short list of XRPL tokens, with more networks planned. Availability follows Uphold’s existing footprint, including the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area, most U.S. states and other supported regions. For XRP, the ledger’s reserve rules still apply, so a small amount of XRP must remain in the account. The model is a compromise between self-custody and conventional brokerage beneficiary designations, offering a documented claim process without granting beneficiaries early access.
