The asset with no safety net

Almost every business I have worked in or with will not let a large payment leave on one person's say-so. Above a set amount, a second authoriser has to approve it, and nobody treats that as an insult to the first. Yet a family can hold a comparable sum in cryptocurrency under a single key: one device, one recovery phrase, one person who can move all of it, alone and at any hour.

That gap deserves more attention than it gets, because the two assets fail in very different ways.

Independence cuts both ways

From my time working in the banking and finance sector, I know that when a transfer goes wrong there is at least a small hope of getting the money back. The bank can try to recall it, there is a process for mistaken payments, and there are people whose job is to look. The odds are often poor, but they are not zero.

A crypto transfer, once confirmed, is final. There is no recall and no fraud team to ring. That is deliberate: Bitcoin in particular was built so that no bank or government could interfere in transactions or holdings. It also means nobody can step in when the holder is deceived or made to sign.

A single key fails in three ways.

Persuaded, forced, or gone

Persuaded. Most crypto theft now targets the holder rather than the technology. A convincing "support agent", a trading platform showing invented profits, a request to sign what looks like a routine approval. Each ends with the owner moving the money themselves, and nobody is positioned to stop them.

Forced. Overseas, physical attacks on crypto holders are rising. Chainalysis, which sells blockchain tracing, reports that in the first half of 2026 they ran at more than twice the previous year's monthly rate. Over a third happened at home, and in a quarter or more the pressure came through family or acquaintances. None in that data is recorded in Australia. The narrower point holds anywhere: when the key is a phrase in someone's head or a device in their study, the people in the house become the way in.

Gone. The holder dies or loses capacity, and the key goes with them. Or the family knows the holding exists but cannot find the phrase, cannot work the device, or finds it and moves it badly under the strain of everything else that is happening.

Often the only person who understands the arrangement is the adult child who set up the device, with no role in the will and nothing written down. And the number of people who know the holding exists is usually larger than the owner thinks: whoever helped buy it, whoever has seen the device, anyone who has heard it mentioned at dinner. Each of them is part of the arrangement whether they know it or not.

Cold storage is the usual advice, and it works against remote theft. Taking the keys offline moves the risk off the network. It also moves it into the house and into one person's memory, which is where the second and third failures live.

Split signing

The answer most large holders reach is the one a business already uses for payments: no single person can move a large amount alone.

Multi-signature (multisig). The wallet has several keys, and a set number must sign before anything moves. The common arrangement is two of three. The rule is enforced by the blockchain itself rather than by any provider.

What matters more for most families than the technology is policy: a second approval above a set amount, a delay on large transfers, a list of approved destinations. A hardware wallet on its own offers none of this. A collaborative custody arrangement or a regulated custodian does.

A sound two-of-three arrangement has the keys held by the owner, an independent party such as a trustee company or a regulated custodian, and a third kept in a secure location away from the home. If you want your lawyer or accountant to hold a key, ask first: many firms will not, and their insurance may not cover it. A scam now has to get past a second signer who has seen that pitch before, and nobody at the door can move the money alone. If one key is lost, or dies with its owner, the other two still work.

There are costs. Split signing is slower, it costs more to set up and maintain, and it relies on the other key holders still existing and still answering in twenty years. Below the amount you could lose without it changing your life, a single well-kept key is fine. Above it, split signing should be the default, and the transaction rules should be set before they are needed rather than after.

If you already hold a single hardware wallet, the first step is simpler: find out who knows where the phrase is, and whether anyone other than you could use it.

When the owner can't sign

Death and incapacity are where a single key does the most damage, and where families are least prepared, because the person who understood the arrangement is the one who is no longer available.

The recovery phrase never goes in the will. A will is read by a number of people before anything is distributed. In New South Wales, for example, close family and anyone who may have a claim on the estate is entitled to see it before probate is granted, and once probate is granted, a will can generally be obtained on application in most states and territories.

What the will should not do is describe the holding. A separate memorandum, kept with the will but not part of it, can record that the holding exists and where the access instructions are kept. Those instructions sit separately and securely, and tell the executor who holds the other keys and how to contact them, without containing anything that would let a reader move the funds. With a two-of-three structure, the executor works with the independent key holder through a documented process, and the family does not need to become technically fluent in the middle of grief.

Incapacity is the same problem with the owner still alive. Legal advice is necessary, but an enduring power of attorney generally gives someone authority over your financial affairs, on terms that differ from state to state, but authority is not access. The attorney needs a way in that works once their authority takes effect, and not before.

Whatever the structure, test it while you are well. Have the people who would need to act walk through the recovery with a small amount, and fix what does not work. Your lawyer drafts the will, the memorandum and the enduring power of attorney. The job alongside that is making sure the people named in them can actually reach the asset and carry out what they say.

Whose job it is

Split signing is the same discipline a family already applies to a trust, a company account or a property title, applied to an asset that offers no safety net of its own. In my experience the difficulty is that it sits between the lawyer, the accountant, the adviser and whoever set up the wallet, and each of them reasonably assumes one of the others has it.

Where the crypto sits in a family trust or company, the asset belongs to the entity while the key usually sits with one person. It is worth knowing who signs when that person stops being a director or trustee, or dies.

Somebody has to hold the whole arrangement: who has keys, who knows the holding exists, what the household has said about it, and whether the people named in the will can actually carry it out. That is the work we do, alongside the lawyer and the custodian rather than instead of them.

If you hold crypto, or advise a family that does, two questions are worth answering: who can move it today, and who could reach it if you couldn't. If either answer is uncertain, that is where we would start.

Craig Searle has spent 25 years in cybersecurity across banking, government, technology and critical infrastructure. He is a Founding Partner of Praetos, a private protective service for private clients and their families.