Building a DeFi Inheritance Vault: The Problem Nobody Talks About
Holdii started at a hackathon — the first Web3 hackathon in New Zealand. Me and two coworkers were invited to help mentor at a university event, but we were also offered the chance to participate. We couldn't win since we were sponsoring, but we figured it'd be fun to build something anyway.
That's when the idea hit us.
The Problem Nobody Plans For
People are getting rich — or trying to get rich — with crypto. Digital fortunes are growing, and for many, their on-chain assets might be worth more than what's sitting in their bank account. But here's the question nobody asks: what happens to all of that when you're gone?
In the traditional world, you set up a trust. Lawyers, paperwork, intermediaries, big fees. It works if you have the wealth to justify the cost. But what about everyone else? What about the person holding $10k in tokens who can't afford — or doesn't need — a full legal trust structure? And what about the person who specifically chose crypto because they wanted to avoid intermediaries in the first place?
We realized there was no native, permissionless way to structure a digital trust on-chain. No bureaucracy, no middlemen, just rules you define and a blockchain that enforces them.
So we decided to build one.
What Holdii Actually Is
The simplest way I can describe it: Holdii is a vault platform that lets you create rules to transfer wealth on your own terms.
You deposit your assets into a smart contract vault. You set the conditions — who the beneficiaries are, when and how they can access the funds, what triggers a release. The blockchain enforces those rules exactly as written, without anyone in between.
Making People Think About It
One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we've gotten is unexpected. People don't push back on the product — they tell us it made them think about the problem for the first time. Most people in crypto simply haven't considered what happens to their assets if something happens to them. There's no prompt, no reminder, no default plan. Holdii forces that conversation.
And because it's on-chain, it's accessible to anyone. You don't need a minimum net worth to justify the setup. Traditional trust structures have a floor — if your assets aren't worth enough, the fees don't make sense. Holdii doesn't have that floor. Whether you're holding $500 or $500,000, you can set up a trust for your family in a permissionless way.
Why It Has to Be On-Chain
We could have built this as a centralized service. Hold people's assets, manage the rules on a server, handle the transfers ourselves. But that would defeat the entire point.
On-chain infrastructure is essential to build a trustless product. We don't want to hold people's assets and assume those risks. We want people to have full control — set their own rules, manage their own assets, use the product in whatever way works for them.
What we're really building is financial infrastructure. And that distinction matters, because it means other use cases can be built on top of it. You can envision a future where Holdii vaults are used as collateral to borrow on a money market, or integrated into broader DeFi strategies we haven't even imagined yet. All of that is enabled by the fact that it lives on a blockchain, composable with everything else in the ecosystem.
Our thesis is simple: real-world assets will keep getting tokenized. Not just cryptocurrencies — real estate, deposits, securities, and more. As tokenized wealth grows, people will need tools to structure how that wealth is managed, transferred, and inherited. Holdii is our bet on being that tool.