Most U.S. crypto exchanges do not offer a payable-on-death or transfer-on-death designation, so the account cannot be pointed at a named beneficiary the way a bank account can. When the owner dies, the holdings pass to the estate and are claimed by the executor or administrator. A smaller number of platforms build inheritance or recovery features into the account. Each platform page notes whether a designation is available.

A self-custody wallet — a hardware wallet or a seed phrase written down offline — is controlled entirely by whoever holds the private keys. No company can reset the keys or restore access. If the keys and recovery phrase are located, the estate can move the assets; if they are lost with the owner, the cryptocurrency is generally unrecoverable. This is the reason key location and recovery instructions matter more for crypto than a beneficiary form.

Cryptocurrency held in the deceased person's own name on an exchange is estate property and can be subject to probate, the same as a brokerage account without a beneficiary designation. The executor or administrator presents the platform with a death certificate and letters testamentary or letters of administration to claim it. Holdings titled in a trust, or held on a platform with its own inheritance arrangement, may transfer outside probate.

The executor identifies which platforms the deceased person used, then follows each platform's death-claim process — typically submitting a death certificate, the court document appointing the executor, and identification. Platforms liquidate or transfer the holdings according to their own procedure. Finding the accounts is often the hard part, because a crypto platform sends no paper statements; a record of which exchanges and wallets were used is what makes the assets reachable.