Family Vaults

Family Bitcoin is usually held the fragile way: one person sets up a wallet, writes a seed phrase on paper, and hopes nothing happens to them. If that person loses the backup, the family loses the money. If that person is coerced, the whole balance is exposed. And if they pass away, heirs are often left with a puzzle they can't solve.

A family vault fixes this by spreading control across the household. No single person can move the funds alone, no single lost backup is fatal, and inheritance becomes a designed feature rather than an emergency.

The shape of a family vault

A common setup is 2-of-3 across a household:

• One key held by each parent, on their own hardware wallet
• One key held by an adult child, or kept as a cold backup in a safe

Two signatures move funds. Everyday decisions need two of the three present, and any single device can be lost and replaced without risk to the balance.

How it works in SigVault

1. Everyone keeps their own account. Each family member signs up for their own SigVault account and connects their own hardware wallet — no shared logins.
2. Create the family organization and invite the household as members.
3. Each member shares one device into the family vault builder, exposing only the public key. Your device stays yours; you're lending visibility into a key, not authority to spend.
4. Build the 2-of-3 vault. SigVault generates a descriptor-based multisig you can restore in any compatible wallet — so the family is never locked into one app.
5. Each member approves the vault explicitly before their key is included.

wsh(sortedmulti(
  2,
  [parent-a/48'/0'/0'/2']xpub6...,   // parent A
  [parent-b/48'/0'/0'/2']xpub6...,   // parent B
  [backup/48'/0'/0'/2']xpub6...      // adult child / cold backup
))

Inheritance without a lawyer's puzzle

The strongest reason to use a family vault is succession. Add a time-locked recovery path: a designated heir's key that becomes able to spend only after a long period of inactivity — say 12 months — during which no one has moved the funds. While the parents are active, that branch is dormant and harmless. If the worst happens, the heir isn't hunting for a hidden seed phrase; the recovery path activates on schedule, by design.

Sharing a device gives the family visibility into a public key — not the ability to spend on your behalf. Every layer is opt-in and revocable in one click.

Why families trust it

• No single point of failure. Losing one device never loses the money.
• Coercion-resistant. No one person can be forced to hand over everything.
• Designed inheritance. Recovery paths make succession explicit instead of accidental.
• Everyone stays independent. Each member keeps their own account, their own device, and their own control.