A brokerage account has a beneficiary form. A wallet has a key — and when the only person who knows it is gone, everything it holds is gone too, in plain sight, for ever. Vigil gives your tokenized stocks an account and a will: who gets it, and how long you must be silent before they can.
Two transactions from your wallet, and your stocks have somewhere to go. Nothing of Vigil's ever holds your money, and nothing changes in how you use it.
Vigil opens a Safe — the account most of crypto keeps its treasuries in — with you as its only owner, and writes into it who should get it: up to five wallets, how many of them must sign once it is theirs, and how long you must be silent before they can.
Move your stocks in and use the account however you like. Withdraw, deposit, rewrite the will, tear it up. Silence does not count on its own: nothing happens while nobody is knocking, however long you leave it.
An heir knocks — in public, on chain. If the account then does nothing at all for the silence you chose, Vigil casts its one vote, and after 7 more days the account is theirs, with everything in it. One transaction from you at any point before that stops it.
Every step is a transaction anyone can see, and every step before the last one is yours to stop. At the default silence, a knock you never answer becomes a hand-over like this:
Most people who hold their own keys already have a plan of sorts. Here is what each one does well, and where it leaves your family.
Simple, free, and it works.
It also hands them the whole wallet today — and anyone who finds the paper, the day they find it. There is no waiting period and no way to take it back short of moving everything.
If that is where your stocks are, use its beneficiary form. It is the better tool.
Vigil is for tokenized stocks you hold yourself, on chain, where no brokerage keeps a record of who you meant to leave them to.
No single key can lose it.
Two-of-two means they co-sign every trade you make, for ever. One-of-two means they can empty it tomorrow. Neither waits to see whether you are still here.
CANDIDE's module — the one Vigil uses — lets guardians take over after 7 days' notice.
But any guardian can start that clock any day, and 7 days is a holiday. Vigil is a guardian that cannot be talked into it: it votes only after an heir knocks and your whole chosen silence has passed.
Vigil cannot tell a death from a silence. Read this before you choose one.
If an heir knocks while you are in hospital, travelling off-grid or simply not looking, and you stay silent for the whole period you chose, the account passes to them. Choose a silence longer than any absence you can imagine. The shortest the contract allows is 30 days; the default is 180 days.
There is no server to send one. A knock is public on chain and this site shows it the moment you open it — but you have to look, or simply use your account now and then: any transaction answers any knock. A silence of months gives you months to notice.
It moves an account; it does not settle an estate, pay a tax or overrule a court. Tell whoever handles your affairs that it exists. And your heirs must keep their own wallets — the account goes to those addresses and to no one else.
Vigil takes no fee, has no token, and never sits between you and your money. Measured on a fork of the real chain, at the gas price and ETH price when this was built.
Measured on a fork of Robinhood Chain at block 67,333,460, priced at 0.0678 gwei and ETH at $2,637 — the gas price the chain reported and the price Robinhood's own ETH / USD feed reported when this was built. Opening an account is two transactions (the Safe, then the will) and costs $0.099 together. The very first account opened on this chain also deploys Vigil itself — $0.222 extra, paid once by whoever is first, never again.
Named plainly, with what each one could do to you if it were wrong.
Your account. The canonical deployment — Safe's own registry lists this chain, and every code hash was compared with it. It holds everything; you are its only owner and its only signer until the hand-over.
The hand-over. CANDIDE's module, version 0.0.1, audited by Ackee Blockchain, with its 7-day period built into its code. It was already on this chain; its code is byte-for-byte the same as on Base, Arbitrum and Optimism, and the 7 days were read out of the code itself.
A 5,354-byte contract with no owner, no upgrade path and no way to move a token. Its only power is one guardian vote, which it casts only after a knock and your silence. If it were wrong, the worst it could do is start CANDIDE's 7 days early — which you can still cancel.
Every one of these is a command in this repository, and every number on this page comes out of one of them. What each check does.
Nothing happens. Silence only counts after an heir knocks, and a knock is public. An account you leave untouched for a decade is still yours the day you come back.
Open Vigil and press I'm here, or simply use the account — any transaction from it voids the knock. They can knock again; each knock starts a new silence, in public, where you can see it.
Then Vigil is your recovery too: name your own second wallet as an heir, knock from it, wait out the silence and the 7 days, and the account is back in your hands.
No. Until the hand-over is finished they are not owners of the account, and the Safe refuses them. The suite on a fork of this chain checks exactly that, and that the refusal is the Safe's own "not an owner".
No. The contract has no owner, no admin and no upgrade path; each account's will is written by that account alone. Its address is derived from its own code, so anyone can check the contract on chain is the one in this site's source.
Their own wallet, the link you give them (or this site's "Find accounts that name me"), and a little ETH on Robinhood Chain for gas. Knocking, asking Vigil to vote and finishing the hand-over are one transaction each.
Everything the account holds passes to the heirs — any token. This site can put a dollar value on 35 tokenized stocks, the ones Robinhood publishes a price feed for on this chain, and shows the rest without a price.
Open an account, name the people who should have it, choose the silence. Two transactions, about $0.099 of gas.
Write your will →