xWill: Digital Estate Inheritance

The Problem

Digital assets -- cryptocurrency wallets, password vaults, sensitive documents -- are lost forever when their owners die. No secure dead man's switch exists that cannot be triggered prematurely or circumvented by a single bad actor.

An estimated $140 billion in cryptocurrency is permanently inaccessible due to lost keys from deceased holders. Password managers, encrypted drives, and digital accounts die with their owners because no trustworthy inheritance mechanism exists. Writing passwords in a safe deposit box creates a single point of compromise.

Existing digital estate solutions rely on trusted third parties -- lawyers, executors, or cloud services -- who hold complete access credentials. This creates the same single-custodian vulnerability: one compromised executor can steal or destroy the entire digital estate before the intended heirs ever know it existed.

The Old Way

The PRIVATE.ME Solution

xWill splits digital estate assets across designated trustees using XorIDA. A dead man's switch monitors periodic check-ins and triggers asset transfer only after consecutive missed intervals.

The estate owner calls vaultEstate() to split their digital assets into N shares distributed across designated trustees. No individual trustee holds enough shares to reconstruct the assets. The threshold K is configurable -- for example, 3-of-5 trustees must cooperate to access the estate.

The dead man's switch configured via configureSwitch() requires the owner to check in at regular intervals (e.g., every 30 days). After a configurable number of consecutive missed check-ins, the switch triggers and the trustees are notified that they can begin the reconstruction process. False triggers from a single missed check-in are prevented by requiring consecutive misses.

The New Way

How It Works

The xWill lifecycle has three phases: vault creation, periodic check-in monitoring, and triggered transfer. Each phase produces cryptographic receipts for all parties.

Use Cases

Integration

import { vaultEstate, configureSwitch } from '@private.me/estatevault';

// Vault digital assets with 5 trustees (3-of-5 threshold)
const vault = await vaultEstate(assetBundle, trustees, {
  k: 3,
  checkInDays: 30
});

// Configure the dead man's switch
const dms = await configureSwitch(vault.vaultId, {
  consecutiveMisses: 3,      // trigger after 3 missed check-ins
  notifyTrustees: true,       // alert trustees on trigger
  gracePeriodDays: 7         // 7-day grace after trigger
});

Security Properties

Verifiable Data Protection

Every operation in this ACI produces a verifiable audit trail via xProve. HMAC-chained integrity proofs let auditors confirm that data was split, stored, and reconstructed correctly — without accessing the data itself.

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Ship Proofs, Not Source

xWill generates cryptographic proofs of correct execution without exposing proprietary algorithms. Verify integrity using zero-knowledge proofs — no source code required.

Use Cases