Failsafe: crypto inheritance without seed phrases
A dead-man's switch for crypto on Stellar, with passkeys instead of seed phrases. Built in three days at Consensus Toronto 2025, where it won the Stellar track.
Roughly 20% of all Bitcoin is estimated to be permanently lost, often because someone died without passing on their keys. At the EasyA x Consensus hackathon in Toronto (May 2025, over 1,000 vetted developers, a $250k+ prize pool, billed as the largest blockchain hackathon in North American history), we built a solution and won the Stellar track.
Failsafe, whose core contract is named DeadMansWallet, is automated estate planning on-chain.
Our Solution
How it works
- You register beneficiaries and check in periodically. If you miss your check-ins, the contract triggers and your funds move to your designated beneficiaries
- A revive window protects against false alarms: return in time and you reclaim everything
- There are no seed phrases anywhere. Authentication runs entirely on passkeys (FIDO2/WebAuthn) via Passkey Kit. Your face or fingerprint is the key, which is the point: your heirs should not need to find a paper backup
The build
A Soroban smart contract in Rust (register, check_in, trigger, revive, and finalize functions, with per-address persistent storage and events) deployed to Stellar Testnet, Launchtube for deployment, a Next.js and TypeScript frontend, and a Node API. I wrote the majority of the code, 28 of the team's 42 commits, all inside the 72-hour window, together with Jochen.
Since time is limited within a hackathon, we had future visions outlined
The win was reported in CoinDesk's coverage of the event.