What happens to my Coinbase account when I die?

Can I name a beneficiary on my Coinbase account?

No. Coinbase's help page says it doesn't currently support naming a beneficiary for individual accounts. Who receives the account is set by your estate planning documents or, if you have none, by your state's intestacy law. So this account goes through your estate, whatever a beneficiary form at your bank does for the accounts there.

What happens to the account when Coinbase learns I've died?

It's frozen. Coinbase's User Agreement says that when it receives legal documentation of a death, or other information leading it to believe the customer has died, it freezes the account. No transactions can be completed until everything in it has been transferred to a new Coinbase account, opened by the person acting for the estate. The agreement calls that person the fiduciary.

The price keeps moving while the paperwork does, and nothing can be sold in the meantime.

What does Coinbase ask the estate to send?

Its help page lists four things:

• •The official death certificate
• •Probate documents for the estate: Coinbase names probate, Letters Testamentary, Letters of Administration, an Affidavit for Collection or a Small Estate Affidavit
• •A current, valid government-issued photo ID of each person named in those documents
• •A letter signed by the people named in them, directing Coinbase to transfer the assets to a specified account, with the email address that account is under

The agreement adds that where nobody has been designated, Coinbase may treat a person entitled to inherit as the fiduciary, after reviewing the documents it considers necessary, such as a will, a living trust or a small estate affidavit. Or it may require a court order.

How does the claim work?

Through a form, from inside a Coinbase account. The person claiming logs in to their own Coinbase account, or creates one, opens the Executor Services form, provides the documents and selects Generate verification code. Then they follow the form's instructions to verify the request.

Two things follow from that. The person settling your estate needs a Coinbase account of their own. And what moves is the contents of your account, into theirs. Neither page speaks of selling anything first or mailing a check.

Can my family use my login instead?

That isn't the route Coinbase describes. Its process is the claim above, made by the people the court papers name, and the account is frozen once Coinbase has reason to believe its owner has died.

What about crypto I hold myself?

That's different in kind. Coinbase's own self-custody app, Coinbase Wallet (its pages also call it the Base app), keeps the private keys on your device. Coinbase says it never has access to the recovery phrase and won't be able to help you recover it. A hardware wallet in a safe works the same way: no company can open it, and there's nobody to send a death certificate to.

Our crypto page and the article What happens to my crypto when I die? cover that side.

What if nobody claims it?

Coinbase's agreement says that if it's holding funds in an account and has no record of the customer using it for several years, the law may require it to deliver them to the state as unclaimed property. An exchange account nobody knows about can end up there.

What can I do now?

Since there's no beneficiary to name, put the account into your will or trust planning; an attorney can tell you how your state treats it. Tell the person who'll settle your estate that the account exists, which email address it's under, and that they'll need a Coinbase account of their own to receive it.

And keep what's on the exchange and what's in your own wallets as separate lines on your list, because your family will handle them in completely different ways. Crypto is the one thing you own that can be lost by being hidden too well.