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: who can act after a death is defined by the wallet’s configuration, and some configurations were designed exactly for this problem.

How these wallets work

In an ordinary wallet, one private key or seed phrase is the access. 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), but there are also account-abstraction wallets (ERC-4337) with features like social recovery paths and session keys.

The owners of a smart-contract wallet are themselves often ordinary wallets with their own seed phrases. The contract itself has no seed phrase: the access rules live in the contract’s configuration, not in one secret word.

How these wallets behave

• Owner sets. Control is defined by the owners/multisig threshold in the contract (for example a Safe with 2-of-3 owners). If the person who passed away was the only owner, the wallet is as blocked as a lost key: unless a recovery module exists. At 2-of-3 with three owners, everything still works after one person falls away; at 2-of-2 it no longer does.
• Modules and recovery paths. Wallets like Safe support modules (e.g. social recovery, time-locked recovery) that can add or replace owners. 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 a key to it; without the owners’ signatures nothing moves.
• 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

• Enable a recovery path while you are able, or keep the owner set multi-person.
• 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.