Inheritance: Make Sure Your Family Can Get to Your DIVI

1What your family needs, and what they don't

DIVI is not held by a company. It is held by whoever knows the keys. Your family needs to be able to become you, as far as the wallet is concerned, and nothing else. That comes down to five things:

1. The recovery phrase. The 24 words from dumphdinfo. They follow BIP39, the Bitcoin standard that "describes the implementation of a mnemonic code or mnemonic sentence" "for the generation of deterministic wallets". Typed into any Divi node, they rebuild every address the wallet ever made.
2. The wallet passphrase. The one you typed at encryptwallet. Needed to spend from a wallet file; not needed if they rebuild from the words.
3. The encrypted wallet backup. The file (Divi node) or folder (IronDivi) from backupwallet. It carries what the words do not: keys you imported from paper wallets, and your labels. (History is rebuilt from the chain either way.)
4. Paper-wallet passphrases and where the papers are. If you followed Cold storage, each paper key has its own passphrase; without it the paper is worthless.
5. A letter in plain words. What DIVI is, which of the above is which, and the address of the tutorial that walks them through it. They will be grieving and they may not be technical.

Password managers already solve "a secret that someone else may open later, but only then". Most of them have a feature for exactly this, usually called emergency access: you name a person, and if they ask for access and you do not say no within a waiting period, they get in. That is the mechanism this page uses. Bitcoin.org puts the goal simply: "If your backup only covers the keys currently visible to you, you might not be able to recover all of your funds."

2Before you start: an encrypted wallet and a saved phrase

Two earlier tutorials do the groundwork. Encrypt your wallet and Back up your wallet. Check both are really done, because this page will tell you to hand a wallet backup to your family and the backup must be an encrypted one. Bitcoin.org's wording: "Encrypting your wallet or your smartphone allows you to set a password for anyone trying to withdraw any funds."

./divi-cli getwalletinfo
# or
./irondivi-cli --testnet getwalletinfo

Look for "encryption_status": "locked" (or "unlocked" if you have just typed the passphrase). If it says "unencrypted", stop and run encryptwallet first, then make a fresh backup; IronDivi reminds you of this in the encryptwallet reply itself: "Back up your wallet again: earlier backups are not encrypted." The Divi node prints the same warning in its log at startup: "Make sure to encrypt your wallet and delete all non-encrypted backups after you verified that wallet works!"

Then make sure the 24 words are in your password manager already. Both nodes refuse to show them while locked:

./divi-cli dumphdinfo
Error: Please enter the wallet passphrase with walletpassphrase first.

Unlock for a minute, copy the words into the manager, lock again. Never type them into a web page, a chat, or an email.

3Put everything in one password-manager entry

Any of the big managers will do. Proton Pass's free plan holds "Unlimited logins, notes and credit cards", so there is no cost to start; 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, Keeper and Apple Passwords all have secure notes too. Make one entry called something your family will recognise, like Divi wallet: read this first, and put these in it:

1. A note with the 24 words, numbered 1 to 24, one per line, so a misread word is easy to spot.
2. The wallet passphrase as a password field, so the manager hides it by default.
3. The encrypted backup as an attachment. The Divi node writes a single file:

   ./divi-cli backupwallet /home/you/divi-wallet-2026-10-21.dat

   IronDivi writes a folder; zip it before attaching:

   ./irondivi-cli --testnet backupwallet /home/you/irondivi-wallet-2026-10-21
   zip -r irondivi-wallet-2026-10-21.zip irondivi-wallet-2026-10-21

   On 2026-10-21 the Divi file was 692,224 bytes and the IronDivi folder held ten files (CURRENT, MANIFEST-000005, 000012.sst and so on). Attachments are a paid feature on some managers; if yours will not take the file, keep it on a USB stick in the same place as the letter and say so in the note.
4. Each paper wallet: its address, where the paper is, and its passphrase as another password field.
5. A link to this page and to Rescue a wallet.

4Turn on emergency access

Now choose who gets in, and how long they must wait. The waiting period is the safety: if someone asks while you are alive and well, you get an email and you say no. Pick a period long enough for you to notice (a holiday without email is the usual test) and short enough that your family is not stranded; most people land on a week or two. Name at least two people if the manager allows it, in case one of them is in the same accident.

What each manager offers

Checked on the vendors' own support pages on 2026-10-21. Prices change; the links are the ones to trust.

So the choice is:

• Proton Pass, Bitwarden or Keeper: add the contact in the manager's Emergency Access settings, choose the wait, and have the contact accept the invitation. The invitation is the step people skip: until it is accepted, nothing is set up. With Bitwarden choose Takeover rather than View if you want them to be able to change the master password afterwards; with Takeover "this user must create a master password for permanent read/write access to your vault".
• 1Password: print the Emergency Kit, write the account password on it, and store it with the letter from step 5. 1Password's own suggestion: "Print a copy to keep in a safe deposit box or with your passport or birth certificate."
• Dashlane or Apple Passwords: there is no after-the-fact access to your passwords. Either move the Divi entry to a manager that has it, or share the entry now: Apple's Passwords app can put it in a Shared Group with a family member while you are alive, which is the same thing with a shorter wait of zero.

5Write the letter

Put this in the password-manager entry and on paper with your will. It does not contain any secrets, so it can be plain. A template; keep the tone, change the names:

To whoever is sorting out my things,

I own some DIVI, a cryptocurrency. It is not in a bank or an app
that someone can phone. It is reachable only with the information
in my password manager, in the entry called
"Divi wallet: read this first".

To open the password manager:
  I use Proton Pass. [Name] is my emergency contact. Log in at
  proton.me, request emergency access, and wait 7 days. If I do
  not refuse, you are in.

In that entry you will find:
  1. 24 words. These are the wallet. Anyone with them can spend
     the coins, so do not photograph them or email them.
  2. The wallet passphrase.
  3. A file called divi-wallet-<date>.dat. It is a backup.
  4. For each paper wallet: where the paper is, and its passphrase.

What to do:
  Follow https://services.divi.domains/tutorials/inheritance/
  from step 6, "Rehearse it". Practise on testnet first, exactly as
  the page says, before touching the real coins. If you get stuck,
  https://services.divi.domains/tutorials/rescue-a-wallet/ covers
  the usual problems, and the Divi community can help with the
  steps, but never give anyone the 24 words or the passphrases.

Where the coins are worth checking:
  My main address is [address]. Paper wallets are listed in the entry.

Signed, dated.

Addresses are public, so listing them here is safe and lets your family check balances on an explorer before they do anything.

6Rehearse it on testnet

This is the part most people skip, and it is the part that proves the plan. Do it on testnet with a wallet funded from the faucet, on a different computer or at least a different data folder, the way your family would. We did all of it on 2026-10-21 and 22 with a wallet that held 25,000 tDIVI, finishing with a 1 tDIVI send from the wallet rebuilt from the words.

From the 24 words

IronDivi takes the words from an environment variable at first start, so they never go on the command line or into a file:

WALLET_MNEMONIC="the 24 words, separated by spaces" ./irondivid --testnet --datadir ~/heir-test

The log says Restoring wallet from WALLET_MNEMONIC environment variable. Our fresh node's first getnewaddress was yDaA4oLzqvYMWEoqExAyde1ggUoKG4pKAV, the same as the original wallet's, and once it had synced its getbalance was 25000.0. A restored wallet is unencrypted: run encryptwallet on it before you do anything else.

The Divi node reads the words from its config file. Create a new data folder with a divi.conf that only you can read, with the line mnemonic= followed by the 24 words, then start it:

mkdir -p ~/heir-test && chmod 700 ~/heir-test
# put testnet=1, server=1, rpcuser=…, rpcpassword=… and the mnemonic= line in ~/heir-test/divi.conf, then:
chmod 600 ~/heir-test/divi.conf
./divid -datadir=$HOME/heir-test -daemon

The node prints "Make sure to encrypt your wallet and delete all non-encrypted backups after you verified that wallet works!" and starts syncing. Divi 3.0.0's release notes list "Added automatic rescan after a seed restore", so the balance appears as the sync catches up.

From the encrypted backup

The backup is for the things the words cannot rebuild: imported paper keys and labels. Restoring it is a file copy, done with the node stopped.

Divi node, two ways. On a node that is already running and synced, loadwallet switches to the file in place; copy it into the data folder first:

cp divi-wallet-2026-10-21.dat ~/.divi/testnet3/heir.dat
./divi-cli loadwallet heir.dat
./divi-cli getwalletinfo

On 2026-10-21 that answered "active_wallet": "heir.dat", "encryption_status": "locked" and the full balance; walletpassphrase with the stored passphrase unlocked it. On a fresh machine, instead put the file in the new data folder as wallet.dat before the first start and let the node sync.

IronDivi keeps the wallet as a folder called wallet inside the data folder. Stop the node, wait until it has really exited, move the old folder aside, copy the backup in, start:

./irondivi-cli --testnet stop
# wait until `pgrep irondivid` prints nothing; on 2026-10-21 that took longer than 30 seconds
mv ~/heir-test/wallet ~/heir-test/wallet.old
cp -r irondivi-wallet-2026-10-21 ~/heir-test/wallet
./irondivid --testnet --datadir ~/heir-test
./irondivi-cli --testnet getwalletinfo

Ours came up with "encryption_status": "locked" and "balance": 25000.0, and the stored passphrase unlocked it. IronDivi's loadwallet command does not do this yet; it answers "Multiple wallet support not yet implemented", so the file copy is the way.

The last step of the rehearsal is the one that matters to your family: with the restored wallet unlocked, send a few tDIVI somewhere. If that works, the plan works. From our rebuilt Divi node: sendtoaddress yDaA4oLzqvYMWEoqExAyde1ggUoKG4pKAV 1 returned transaction 7d67409d…1806a9. Write the date of the rehearsal in the password-manager entry.

7Keep it current

A plan rots. Each of these changes the entry:

• You make a new paper wallet (new address, new passphrase, new place). Add it the same day.
• You import a key or change the wallet passphrase. Make a new encrypted backup and replace the attachment.
• Your emergency contact changes email, or you fall out. Re-invite.

The printed letter follows the 3-2-1 rule as the US cybersecurity agency CISA states it: "3 – Keep 3 copies of any important file: 1 primary and 2 backups. 2 – Keep the files on 2 different media types to protect against different types of hazards. 1 – Store 1 copy offsite (e.g., outside your home or business facility)." One copy with the will, one with the emergency contact, one in the manager. Then put a reminder in your calendar and do the yearly checkup, which repeats step 6 and checks the manager still has the entry.

If something goes wrong