Smart-contract wallets and inheritance

A smart-contract wallet is not a private-key file, it is a contract on the blockchain whose “rules” (owners, signers, modules) are part of the wallet itself. That changes inheritance: which signatures can technically execute a transaction is defined by the wallet’s configuration; who may legally use that ability is a separate estate question, and some configurations were designed exactly for this problem.

How these wallets work

For many traditional self-custody wallets, access is based on one or more private keys, often derived from recovery material. A smart-contract wallet is different: it is a program on the blockchain with its own address and rules about who may act on it. The best-known form is a multisig Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe); there are also ERC-4337-based smart-account configurations with features like social recovery paths and session keys. Safe and ERC-4337 are separate concepts: with Safe, ERC-4337 functionality is added through an optional module and is not automatically active.

The owners or signers of a smart-contract wallet can use different types of accounts or authentication methods, for example a software or hardware wallet, another smart account or a passkey. The smart-contract account itself has no seed phrase of its own; the access and authorisation rules are determined by the contract’s configuration and the configured owner or module routes.

How these wallets behave

• Owner sets. Control is determined by the owners and the configured threshold of the contract. If the person who passed away was the only owner, technical access depends on whether the corresponding owner authorisation is still available and whether other valid authorisation or recovery routes exist. A 1-of-1 Safe is not automatically technically blocked by the death. If the required owner authorisation is no longer available and no usable recovery route exists, the wallet can become technically inaccessible. With a 2-of-3 configuration, the normal owner route can keep working as long as enough valid and lawfully usable owner authorisations are available.
• Modules and recovery paths. Safe supports a modular system in which, depending on the chosen and activated module, recovery mechanisms can be set up that add or replace owners. Check on-chain which modules are actually active. If the person who passed away enabled one, heirs may have a defined, lawful route, if the setup is documented.
• EIP-1271 / EIP-4337. Signature-validation and account-abstraction standards make these wallets programmable, which also means their behaviour cannot be assumed from a hardware wallet’s manual. A contract cannot simply remove an owner who has passed away; that requires the owners or a valid recovery route.

What this means for an estate

• Find the wallet’s configuration first. On-chain data (owners, modules, threshold) is public and safe to look at, it contains no secrets.
• The contract, not the device, decides access. A hardware wallet that “signed” for the smart contract is one part of the setup. Which authorisation is required is determined by the contract’s actual configuration: an owner threshold may be required, but activated modules or other valid authorisation paths can provide additional or alternative execution routes.
• A lost single owner can be fatal unless a recovery path was configured while the owner was alive.
• Document the structure, not the secrets. Record that it is a smart-contract wallet and which type, who the owners are, what the threshold is, whether a recovery module exists, where the owner keys are kept, and who can explain the setup.

Planning ahead

• Only consider a recovery mechanism that demonstrably fits the specific wallet and security model. Do not add a recovery module without technical assessment: additional modules can introduce extra rights and security risks. A carefully designed multi-person owner configuration can be an alternative.
• Document the configuration (which contract, which chain, which owners) in the estate map, configuration, not keys.
• Get a technical review by a qualified party; these wallets are new and the cost of a wrong assumption is high.

If access is genuinely blocked, the honest picture is in wallet recovery: what is realistically possible, and for positions held inside protocols, see DeFi after a death.