Your first hour
The whole setup in order, from creating an account to a vault your family can actually inherit.
Follow these in order. Each step depends on the one before it, and the app will keep nudging you until they are done. Most people finish in under an hour, minus the wait for identity verification.
1. Create your account
Sign up with your email and confirm the 6-digit code. Then pick your data region: the country whose servers hold your encrypted files. Choose where you actually live if it is on the list, because it cannot be changed afterwards.
Name your family, verify your phone number, and you are in.
2. Complete your profile
Do this before anything else. Your will is generated from these fields, so an incomplete profile produces an incomplete will.
Each section of the profile saves separately. More detail in Your profile.
3. Verify your identity
BlockWill verifies identity through SumSub. Have a government ID and your camera ready. Most of the app stays locked until this comes back approved, and approval is not instant, so start it early and carry on with the rest once it clears.
The Verify Now banner on your dashboard takes you straight there. The screen lists what you need before you begin, so you are not halfway through when you find out.
4. Create your vault
Your vault is the encrypted container everything else lives in. Name it, then set a BlockWill Secret: a 16-character passphrase, and the only unlock method offered for a first vault.
Write that passphrase down somewhere physical before you continue. Nobody at BlockWill can recover it, by design.
5. Add a second way in
One unlock method is one accident away from losing everything. Add Touch ID, Face ID, or a hardware key now, while you still have the first method to authorise it with.
The kinds of key and why each matters: Vault keys.
6. Add your assets
Property, accounts, crypto, policies, documents, whatever makes up the estate. Each asset is filed by category and type, valued, and can carry supporting files. It is all encrypted on your device before it is uploaded.
You do not have to add everything at once. Start with the things nobody else knows about, because those are the ones that get lost.
7. Add your people
Beneficiaries inherit, executors act, guardians look after minors, and asset managers help you maintain the vault. Each one gets an invitation by email.
An executor is the same flow with a different role selected.
Editing people, chasing invitations and granting an asset manager vault access are all in The people around your estate.
8. Write your DigiWish
Your will. It pulls from your profile and your assets, splits each asset between beneficiaries, and can be signed and anchored to the blockchain so its contents can be proved unchanged later.
Allocations, instructions, versions and signing are all in DigiWish.
9. Set up Vault Relay
The handover machinery: how BlockWill works out that something has happened to you and passes the vault to your beneficiaries. Set your inactivity timer, decide whether you also want a fixed dead-man-switch date, and make sure your executors know they are executors.
The two paths, what an executor has to confirm, and the wellness check-ins that keep the timer reset: Vault Relay.
Once you are set up
The app goes quiet. What you come back for:
- Keeping assets current as you buy and sell things
- Re-signing your DigiWish after material changes, since an edit creates a new unsigned version
- Answering the occasional wellness check-in, which resets your inactivity timer
- Reviewing who has access, in everyday tasks
The one thing worth doing today rather than eventually is step 5. Everything else can be corrected later. Being locked out cannot.