The Diamond membership offers a thorough, guided inheritance program to ensure that your loved ones are able to access your funds if you're unable to.
The Diamond inheritance program, available exclusively to Diamond members, is designed to ensure that there are no compromises to your existing security.
See our overview of the Diamond inheritance program.
What about Gold members?
It's important to us that all of our members are aware of the requirements for key recovery in the event of their death, and the tools available to them to ensure that their funds are not lost forever.
By design, Casa can never send funds from your vault. For this reason, it is very important that you let your potential beneficiaries know how to access your funds should something happen to you.
The following are some guidelines on what Gold members can do to prepare for such a scenario:
Gold members have two main options when it comes to planning their inheritance structure:
- Share the information necessary to send funds from within the Casa app (less secure)
- Share instructions for Sovereign Recovery (more secure)
What's normally needed to send funds from a standard 3-key vault in the Casa app with a mobile key:
- Login access to your Casa account (username/password)
- One of the following:
- Access to and the ability to unlock your personal phone, OR
- Login access to your phone's cloud service to restore the mobile key from the cloud backup on a different device with the same operating system. This means access to your Apple account if you're an iPhone user or your Google account if you're an Android user.
- Physical access to your hardware key
- The PIN code to your hardware key
You can share this information with someone you trust, but be aware that if they can access all these things, they can send your funds as though they were you. How much of the above information you share with another person (e.g., a spouse, estate attorney, etc.) is up to you, but keep in mind that any information you supply to any 3rd party presents additional risk of compromise, even if you trust the person!
Keep in mind that if access to the Apple or Google account is not possible to retrieve the mobile key from the backup, funds can alternately be sent using the hardware device in combination with the Casa Recovery Key. However, in order to use the Casa Recovery Key, your beneficiary must be able to sign into the Casa app and answer your security questions.
Sovereign Recovery and Gold inheritance
Sovereign Recovery is what we call the ability to create a transaction outside of the Casa app using open-source, third-party tools.
Sovereign Recovery was designed to ensure that, in the unlikely event that Casa disappears without warning, you, the Casa member, would still be able to access your funds.
Sovereign Recovery can also be used to ensure that your funds can be moved in the event of your death with less authentication than in "normal" operation.
Sovereign Recovery is recommended only if you have set up your vault using two hardware devices, or have at some point replaced your mobile key with a second hardware key, not if your account is set up with the mobile key. If your account is set up with the mobile key, we recommend following the steps previously mentioned to sign with the mobile key rather than performing Sovereign Recovery.
If your setup includes two hardware devices, those two hardware devices can be used to send funds after following the Sovereign Recovery instructions without the need to log into the Casa app.
If your hardware device is PIN protected, your beneficiary needs to know your PIN! Hardware devices can lock a user out or delete their keys if the PIN is entered incorrectly too many times.
To view the information and instructions you need to carry out Sovereign Recovery, navigate to the "Account" tab in the Casa app and tap "Send Sovereign Recovery info," or check the email you received when you set up your vault.
Print out the Sovereign Recovery instructions, keep them somewhere safe and secret, and make sure that your beneficiary knows where to find them, as well as where to find your hardware keys. While these instructions by themselves cannot be used to steal your funds without access to the hardware keys, they could be used to set up a watch-only wallet to monitor your transactions, so they should be sealed in tamper-evident packaging and should be stored somewhere safe. Where you store them is up to you, but some suggestions on where to store these instructions are:
- In a safe deposit box
- With an estate lawyer
- In an office safe
We recommend keeping your custom recovery instructions geographically separate from your keys.
Our recorded webinar, linked below, is also a good resource for how Gold customers should think about inheritance:
