Kresus Prices Crypto Inheritance at $99.99/Year, Targets Self-Custody’s Key Gap

Self-custody wallet provider Kresus has launched a paid succession product, Kresus Inheritance, that lets holders of self-custodied digital assets designate beneficiaries without exposing private keys during setup. The service costs $99.99 per year and is bundled directly into the Kresus wallet, according to the company.

The structural gap the product targets

Self-custody removes intermediaries and gives holders direct control over keys, but it also strips out the estate-planning infrastructure that traditional finance takes for granted. Kresus says beneficiary designations, inheritance mechanisms and recovery processes remain limited across the digital asset space, leaving a gap that on-chain researchers have long flagged as a driver of permanently inaccessible supply — coins locked behind lost or undocumented keys with no legal successor mechanism.

Existing workarounds, per the company, typically require users to share or store sensitive key material with a third party or family member ahead of time, which introduces its own attack surface: a single leaked seed phrase or written-down recovery sheet can compromise funds long before any inheritance event occurs.

How the mechanism differs from key-sharing

Kresus Inheritance is designed to avoid that trade-off by not requiring users to share private keys or run complex manual recovery procedures to set a succession plan. The company has not disclosed the underlying technical mechanism in detail, but frames the product as closing the estate-planning gap for self-custody without reintroducing the custodial or shared-secret risk that alternative solutions carry.

For active holders and fund operators managing meaningful self-custodied balances, the annual fee sits well below the cost of most legal estate structuring, positioning the service as a retail-accessible layer rather than a replacement for formal trust or will arrangements involving digital assets.

Why this matters for on-chain researchers

Lost or unrecoverable private keys are a recurring variable in circulating-supply estimates for major assets, with wallets frozen by death or forgotten credentials routinely cited as a source of effective supply reduction that standard market-cap models do not capture. A commercially available succession layer built into a mainstream self-custody wallet could, over time, reduce the rate at which balances become permanently orphaned — a data point worth tracking for anyone modeling long-term float rather than headline supply figures.

The launch also signals continued product build-out around self-custody infrastructure beyond transaction signing and asset storage, as wallet providers compete on features adjacent to core custody, including recovery, compliance tooling and now succession planning.