Some of us consider ourselves way too young to be thinking about planning for death and creating a will. I don’t blame you. It’s a taboo topic no one really likes to dwell on. If you actively invest in crypto and don’t hold all your investments on a centralized exchange (such as Coinbase), what are the steps to passing that crypto on to your loved ones and family once you pass?
Sarah gave one part of her seed phase to her brother and another part of her seed phrase to her sister. But what if they come together and conspire against her? Current systems of dispersing seed phrases among family are not secure and require trust. With many new wallets created every day, how many of these wallets actually account for social recovery? I’m guessing, close to 0.
This weekend, at EthAmsterdam, a group of H.E.R. DAO scholars came together for an EthGlobal hackathon to come up with a solution to this existing problem. The solution is called Kindred.
We had 36 hours to hack together a solution. Here’s what we decided to do:
Our solution revolves around using a multi-sig wallet. We created a dApp where the owner adds a minimum of 5 beneficiaries when creating a new wallet. We used Gnosis Safe core SDK to create the multi-sig wallet. In the dApp the user enters the list of beneficiaries and their percentages, but does not enter any personal information about those users. It is a fully decentralized system.
Here’s what happens next. The user can use the Kindred platform, as a form of savings account for their family, adding funds to their account whenever they wish. We will be logging their periods of inactivity. Once their reach a certain threshold of inactivity, we will be using the EPNS (Ethereum Push Notification System) to send the owner a notification. It will be along the lines of asking the user “Are you still there?”. If the user does not respond, the contract will ping them a couple mores, since everyone is prone to missing notifications at some point in time.
However, if no response it heard, the ENPS system will then send a notification out to the beneficiaries. If 3/5 beneficiaries sign, this will then release the funds to them. However, there is a 30–90 day holding period, during which the owner has the power to override to transaction, in the case that the owner is still alive.
This concept we named: PoD (Proof of Death), where your family is essentially your validator nodes.
During the hackathon, we built out a very rough system. Now that we are post hackathon, and somewhat caught up on sleep, we will be continuing to build out this implementation. There is a lot of work in the pipeline, but at the moment we are planning on continuing forward with the Gnosis Safe, EPNS, Boba Network for deployment, and Pocket Network for setting up Ethereum nodes.
If you would like to stay involved with our journey moving forward, please follow us on twitter https://twitter.com/kndred_
