Heirhold

It is a well-known fact that a considerable amount of cryptocurrency holdings are inaccessible and permanently locked due to lost private keys. According to an estimate by Chainalysis, about one-fifth of all bitcoin is affected.

Heirhold is a smart wallet solution that addresses this problem by implementing a secure, time-locked recovery mechanism.

A Heirhold wallet owner designates a list of authorized claimants and defines a claim grace period and claim fee. At any time, the authorized claimants can make a claim for ownership of the wallet. Such a claim is usually considered legitimate if the owner has passed away or lost access to the private key. In that case, the claimant will assume ownership once the claim grace period has elapsed. The claim fee, which acts as a deterrent against misuse, is fully refunded to the claimant.

It is the owner's responsibility to periodically check their Heirhold wallet for claims. The suggested default claim grace period is one year, so owners should check their wallet annually to reject any unwanted claims. If an owner rejects a claim, they retain the claim fee payed by the claimant.

All steps of the process are enforced by a smart contract, ensuring secure and verifiable proceedings.

This project is built on Rootstock, Ethereum, Solidity, Hardhat, ethers.js, Wagmi, React, React Bootstrap.

At the core of the solution are two smart contracts: the Heirhold Factory and the Heirhold Wallet. A React/Bootstrap-based frontend enables easy interaction with these contracts.