Your digital life has no next of kin.
Every year, billions in UK assets vanish — locked behind passwords no one knows, bound to devices no one can unlock, absorbed by a Crown that was never meant to have them. This is what the data shows, and what Holdfast is built to hold.
Eighty-five point six percent leave no instructions at all.
Most Britons have never written down a password, a recovery phrase, or a single account location for the people they love. The will is a public document — and so the keys cannot go in it. They go nowhere instead.
The plan exists only in the verbal.
Across UK adults surveyed (Which?, Apr 2024 · The Investors Centre, Feb 2026), a single pattern repeats: intent without mechanism. People care deeply, and leave nothing behind that anyone can use.
Rachel Thompson v Apple.
Matthew Thompson died in 2015 without a will. His widow Rachel was sole heir and executrix, yet Apple refused access to his iCloud account and required a specific court order. The legal battle ran three years, from 2016 to 2019, before she recovered over 4,500 photos and 900 videos.
Gerald Cotten & QuadrigaCX.
The founder of Canada’s largest crypto exchange died in December 2018 holding the only passwords to the company’s cold wallets. Up to C$250 million belonging to 115,000 customers was sealed and unreachable. A later investigation also found fraud.
The most common surname is Smith.
94 Smiths on the register. 1,612 unclaimed estates in London alone. These are not edge cases. They are ordinary people with no will, no heir, no instructions, and a thirty-year window most miss.
Two columns, one seam.
The state of things With a Holdfast vaultA system of five quiet steps.
Your vault stays sealed during your lifetime. One click per check-in keeps it that way. The design is boring on purpose.
Build your vault.
Store credentials, legal details, letters, wishes, crypto keys. Encrypted on your device before anything leaves it — Holdfast’s servers see only ciphertext, never plaintext.
Nominate recipients.
Choose who receives what. Solicitors, partners, siblings, children. Each can hold a separate section; solicitors don’t count against your plan’s limit.
Set your check-in schedule.
Weekly or monthly. One click per reminder confirms all is well and the vault stays sealed. No activity is required beyond that single click.
Missed check-ins trigger escalation.
A gentle “is everything alright?” first. Then a second. Then a third. Only after the full grace period with no response does delivery begin — designed to forgive holidays and illness.
The vault delivers itself.
Recipients receive a secure, time-limited link. They use the passphrase shared offline to decrypt. No account needed. No tutorial. The vault explains itself on arrival.
The law changed. Behaviour hasn’t.
As of December 2025, UK law formally recognises digital assets — cryptocurrency, email accounts, online holdings — as personal property. Executors can now legally pursue them. But the practical mechanism still depends on passwords, private keys and recovery codes that only you know. The legal right exists. The access doesn’t — unless you build it before it’s needed.
Your vault. Delivered when it matters.
The UK’s zero-knowledge digital estate vault. ICO-registered, GDPR-compliant. Built by someone who spent twenty years protecting enterprise infrastructure — and turned that expertise toward protecting what matters most.
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