Curriculum·Freshman·F110
Inheritance and Continuity
Matthew Mellon died in April 2018 holding a reported half a billion dollars of XRP. The keys were kept on devices registered to other people in various locations, and for years the holdings were reported as lost; court records later showed the estate regained access only through Ripple, under an agreement that capped daily sales, and selling took almost three years.
Lesson 1 opens on
Matthew Mellon
Mellon died in April 2018 holding XRP that the press put at more than half a billion dollars and his estate's court filings valued at about $193M. He had kept the keys on devices registered to other people in various locations, a reasonable defense against theft, and his will did not mention digital assets. For years the holdings were reported as lost.
The lessons
- F110-01Why most crypto dies with its ownerExplain why the mechanisms that protect traditional estates do not exist for self-custodied assetsabout 21 min · opens on Matthew Mellon
- F110-02Estate planning meets private keysSeparate the legal half of an inheritance plan from the technical half and explain why a plan with only one half failsabout 22 min · opens on Matthew Moody
- F110-03Secret splitting and Shamir, without the mathCompute how much security a naive split of a seed phrase actually destroys, by handabout 37 min · opens on The split-it-in-half folk method
- F110-04Dead-man switches that actually workName the five components every dead-man switch has and the failure mode attached to eachabout 23 min · opens on The check-in that could not tell death from a hospital stay
- F110-05What to tell your heirs, and what not toState the actual goal of the disclosure conversation, which is narrower than teaching someone cryptoabout 21 min · opens on The kidnapping of David Balland
- F110-06Writing the continuity planWrite a continuity plan a non-technical heir could execute without you, using a fixed section structureabout 21 min · opens on Stefan Thomas and the IronKey
Labs
F110-L1
A written plan a non-technical heir could execute: what exists, where it is, what to do first, what never to do, and who to call. Rubric-scored. This is the gate component, because it is enforceable for every learner regardless of circumstance.
F110-L2
A named heir recovers a test wallet using only the written plan, with the learner absent and unable to help. The sibling of the Wipe Drill: a plan nobody has executed is not a plan. Strongly recommended, not gated, because it requires a second consenting person and many learners do not yet have one.